Keynote Speaker

Amy Ship, M.D.

Amy N. Ship, M.D. is an internist and educator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She received a B.A.with Honors in English Literature from Swarthmore College, an M.A. in Art History from Columbia University, and her M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Before becoming a doctor, she did curatorial work at two major art museums and was a reporter for a national newspaper. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Beth Israel Hospital and served as Chief Resident in Primary Care. She has completed two fellowships in Medical Education at the Shapiro Institute for Medical Education at BIDMC. For more than a decade, she has co-directed the BIDMC site for Harvard Medical School's introduction to clinical skills course, called "Patient-Doctor II", teaching history-taking, examination skills, presentation, write-ups, and clinical reasoning, as well as professionalism and "doctoring." She has taught since 2004 in the "Primary Care Clerkship", teaching a third year student in clinical practice sessions for a year, and she serves as a tutor for the 3rd year course, "Patient-Doctor III". Dr. Ship supervises the work of four medicine residents annually in weekly clinic sessions and teaches in the ambulatory medicine curriculum at BIDMC.

Since 1999 Dr. Ship has been a Deputy Editor of the "Clinical Crossroads" conference series, published monthly in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Dr. Ship lectures locally and nationally on diverse topics including "Giving Bad News", "Improving the Art of Physical Diagnosis", "Giving Effective Feedback", and "Primary Care for Breast Cancer Survivors". Since 2007, Dr. Ship has led workshops for clinicians using literature to facilitate discussion of complex issues and to enhance empathy. Currently, she facilitates the "Literature and Medicine" program sponsored by the Massachusetts Council for the Humanities at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Ship has received numerous awards for teaching, mentoring, and humanism, and was the recipient of the Kenneth Schwartz Compassionate Caregiver of the Year Award in 2009 and the prestigious S. Robert Stone Award for Excellence in Teaching from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 2010.