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EXCLUSIVE: A new hospital watchdog and evaluator will be launched Wednesday by the medical policy group Do No Harm (DNH), which pledged to strip wokeness and divisive politics from American medicine.
Instead of including all typical considerations in ranking medical centers and hospitals for their quality of care, the center will also announce its inaugural rankings based on apolitical, statistically-driven criteria – with the University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine receiving its only perfect score of 100.
The launch of the Center for Accountability in Medicine is a “major step forward” in DNH’s mission to “restor[e] integrity to medicine,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, DNH’s founder, told Fox News Digital.
The rest of the top five medical schools, according to the breaking rankings, are NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, UPenn’s Perelman School of Medicine, University of Michigan’s medical school and the University of Central Florida College of Medicine.
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Dr. Ian Kingsbury, the director of the new center, told Fox News Digital that its “Medical School Excellence Index” rankings are urgently needed to “combat the tide of wokeness in healthcare.”
“To eliminate DEI’s divisive influence in medicine, we must recognize medical schools that focus on excellence and expose those that promote political activism,” Kingsbury said.
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“The Center advances Do No Harm’s mission of ensuring patients, not politics, remain the top priority of the institutions training our future medical professionals.”
Referencing the index’s criteria, Goldfarb said the center will seek to expose medical schools with “racially-based admissions practices” as well as college accreditors’ DEI mandates on those schools.
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Goldfarb said DNH’s past activity bringing suits against institutions over programs that discriminate against any group or class of people and its own work in being an accreditor watchdog have led to “unprecedented success in rooting out divisive identity politics from healthcare.”
“The new Center, under Ian Kingsbury’s leadership, will continue and expand this work to ensure our nation’s medical institutions are held accountable and prioritize merit and expertise, not an ideological agenda,” he added.
The index evaluates every U.S. medical school that grants M.D. degrees—excluding Puerto Rico—across three pillars: academic excellence, transparency, and rejection of DEI.
A school is awarded 25 out of 100 points if it does not take DEI into account, while earning zero points and putting it at an overall disadvantage in the rankings if it does incorporate DEI into its own academic calculus.
The academic excellence section analyzes average undergraduate GPAs and those schools in the top quintile of such statistics earn 30 points – the maximum under that particular rubric.
A school is also graded on public transparency of grading – with zero points awarded for pass/fail rubrics and 10 points if tiers like “honors” are incorporated into grades.
“Historically, it has been important for medical schools to clearly differentiate performance among enrolled students,” the center wrote in its results reviewed by Fox News Digital.
“Unfortunately, the ascendancy of DEI has largely derailed this tradition. Instead, schools attempt to obscure differences in student performance, making it easier to advance students who may not meet rigorous academic standards.”
An institution also earns a few points if it has an active chapter of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society, the medical iteration of Greek life.
Select schools in California, New Mexico, Oregon and Michigan ranked near the bottom, by contrast.
In its rankings, DNH writes that proponents of DEI wrongfully argue that it “enhances cultural competence and addresses health disparities.”
“While diversity in thought and experience can enrich medicine, forced DEI initiatives prioritize superficial metrics over genuine merit, fostering resentment and division,” the center said, adding that claims such subjective considerations alleviate certain health disparities are “entirely unsubstantiated.”
Do No Harm views DEI as essentially lowering academic standards in exchange for nonmedical criteria, as well as that it inserts politics into medicine.
Other similar organizations support or do not demerit schools who enforce DEI considerations.
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