Calvin Chou, MD, PhD | Using Good Judgment While Remaining Nonjudgmental: Threading the Needle in Remediation in Medical Education

Calvin Chou, MD, PhD is Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, and staff physician at the Veterans Affairs Health Care System in San Francisco. After undergraduate work at Yale, he received his PhD in microbiology and his MD at Columbia University, and subsequently completed residency training in internal medicine at UCSF.

As Senior Faculty Advisor for External Education with the Academy of Communication in Healthcare (ACH), he is recognized internationally for leading workshops in relationship-centered communication, feedback, conflict, and remediation in health professions education. Currently he is director of VALOR, a longitudinal program based at the VA that emphasizes humanistic clinical skill development for medical students. He also held the first endowed Academy Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at UCSF. He has delivered communication skills curricula for providers at health systems across the country, including Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Stanford Health, NewYork Presbyterian, AdventHealth System, Wake Forest, and Texas Children’s Hospital, and internationally as well. His research interests include assessment of curricular developments in clinical skills and clinical skills remediation, forces influencing feedback in health sciences education, and enhancing humanistic communication for interprofessional trainees. A member of the UCSF Academy of Medical Educators since 2002, he has received numerous teaching awards at UCSF, including the Henry J. Kaiser Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Inpatient Setting, and two of ACH’s national awards, the 2019 Healthcare Communication Teaching Excellence Award, and the 2018 Lynn Payer Award for outstanding contributions to the literature on the theory, practice, and teaching of effective healthcare communication and related skills. He is co-editor of the books Remediation in Medical Education: A Midcourse Correction, and Communication Rx: Transforming Healthcare Through Relationship-Centered Communication.