Leading Medicine’s Next Generation into a New Century

AT 6’8”, THE FIRST THING you notice about Said Ibrahim, MD, is that he’s big.

Then you talk to him, and you see what’s really big is his vision for educating the next generation of doctors. “Science and technology are advancing [and] artificial intelligence is coming, while health disparities are widening,” he says. “How do we teach these new tools to physicians? How do we use them in a responsible way that helps everyone in the community? We want to be ahead of the game and be at the forefront of this new frontier.”

In December 2023, Ibrahim became the 25th dean of Sidney Kimmel Medical College, charged with extending—and enhancing—a 200-year legacy of hands-on, humanistic clinical education.

“Dr. Ibrahim has demonstrated a strong commitment to fostering innovation, collaboration, and inclusivity within the medical community,” says Susan Aldridge, PhD, interim president of Thomas Jefferson University. “He brings not only a deep understanding of the evolving landscape of medical education, but also a vision for furthering our medical school’s reputation as a hub for academic excellence, cutting-edge research, compassionate patient care, and diversity and inclusion.”

An internal medicine physician and health equity researcher, Ibrahim grasps the historical import of his appointment at this moment in time: the first Black dean of the medical college, the Bicentennial, unprecedented headwinds in healthcare. Yet he believes he is in the right place at the right time to make a meaningful difference.

“Jefferson has a 200-year-old medical school, with esteemed alumni across the United States and around the world,” Ibrahim says. “Our combination of a historic institution academically with a clinically expanding healthcare system in one of the most diverse cities in the country is fascinating to me. We must figure out how to bring the clinical mission closer to the academic mission. If we can’t do it in Philadelphia and at Jefferson, no one else can.”

Somalia has been called a nation of poets for its people’s felicity of expression, love of song, and capacity to dream. 

As a young boy growing up on the Somalian-Ethiopian border, Ibrahim dreamed of becoming a doctor. 

One of 10 children of a police officer earning about $100 a month, he recalls watching neighbors, friends, and family members suffering from preventable illnesses. There was only one doctor for the entire town, and he was admired by everyone. It left a deep impression on Ibrahim. 

“My family was not an upper-class family, so I didn’t have an opportunity to go to medical school in Somalia,” he says. “I had to wait until the opportunity came.”

Ibrahim’s first big break came when he was recruited from high school to join Somalia’s national basketball team.

In 1984, that exposure earned him a shot at a scholarship as a Division I college basketball player in the United States. But things didn’t go as planned. “My basketball career in the U.S. lasted just hours because I wasn’t good enough,” he says with a philosophical air. 

But now he had a foot in the door for a U.S. education, putting him a step closer to his dream. He earned entry into Oberlin College in Ohio, where he met his future wife of 40 years, Lee Erickson, who hailed from Philadelphia. 

While he wasn’t a blue-chip talent on the court, he became an all-star in the classroom. 

After college, the couple moved to Philadelphia, where Ibrahim became a lab tech at the Wistar Institute and Lee worked as a paralegal. Together, they applied to medical schools and were both accepted to Case Western School of Medicine. From there, Ibrahim completed his residency in internal medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and joined University Hospitals of Cleveland as a faculty member.  

His star continued to rise, as he went on to serve at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell Medical School. He then became chair of the department of medicine and senior vice president for the medical service line for Northwell Health in Long Island, New York, before joining Jefferson.

Health equity and healthcare disparities have been central to Ibrahim’s personal mission as a physician.

His first major study looked at how socioeconomic factors affect knee and hip replacement surgery. “No one was studying this at the time,” he says. These are elective treatments, and as such, Ibrahim found a marked difference by gender, status, race, ethnicity, and geography. He began to understand how social settings shape healthcare realities. His first grant on the issue was funded by the NIH, and he’s been continuously funded on it for 25 years.

“Healthcare disparities are very complex because they combine social issues with health system issues,” Ibrahim explains. “Jefferson wants to provide value to the community. But the community is much more than just those who come to our hospitals.”

Determining how to design healthcare delivery to address the community’s needs is a unique challenge. The solutions have to involve not just how systems deliver care but also how physicians engage the community about health, build community ties, and find ways to impact health and wellbeing.

There’s also the issue of access to healthcare. “Medicine is growing in so many ways, and we’re coming up with new cures and new treatments—but they’re too expensive for most people and not available to a lot of people,” he says. “How do we make or help the new cures be available to more people? That’s what the community is interested in and what we must do.”

Ibrahim says the reality is that most of health is what happens outside of healthcare—his mission is to figure out how to bridge that.

“It’s a new way of thinking about the relationship between health and the social setting—social determinants of health,” he says. “We need to go outside of the health system and get to the community.”

Jefferson was founded 200 years ago by George McClellan, who believed that society needed a different kind of doctor, which meant devising a new way of teaching medicine. 

Back then, medical students learned in classrooms, through books and lectures and diagrams. Only after earning a degree was a newly minted doctor sent out into the world to see patients. 

McClellan realized the best way to learn medicine was to actually see patients. Jefferson became one of the first schools in the world where students interacted with patients, thereby revolutionizing medical education. 

Today, Ibrahim sees a similar need to reframe how we train physicians in order to meet the changing demands of society as well as the radically shifting healthcare climate. 

Healthcare as an industry was in the midst of seismic changes to its model before 2020. Then came COVID-19, which Jefferson’s David Nash, MD, MBA, the Dr. Raymond C. and Doris N. Grandon Professor in Health Policy, says “crashed the system.” The pandemic, public health failures, poor communication, racism, and calls for social justice eroded trust in healthcare. Hospitals and practices funded by the fee-for-service model collapsed, while insurance companies banked payment from policyholders and posted windfall profits.

“Healthcare is at a crossroads,” Ibrahim asserts. “There’s an eroding sense of trust between the patient and the physician, which is essential for good care. It’s a good time to reenergize the scientific community to make the case that science is good, and something that we should really get behind. It’s time for us to train physicians who embody the importance of trust between the doctor and the patient.”

Ibrahim sees hope—and a solution—to these issues in tomorrow’s medical students. Often, it’s hard for physicians and healthcare leaders rooted in the current system to ideate outside of that system, but new students can be taught and encouraged to see things differently and follow novel paths.

“It is a very important and exciting time to be a medical student,” Ibrahim says. “Medicine provides many opportunities to do all kinds of different things. You could see patients as a caregiver; you could also be a teacher in medicine. You could be a computer specialist and perform research. You could be a doctor of informatics. You can run health systems. You could even be in business. Medicine allows people to do what they’re passionate about in more ways than one.”

Ibrahim is intrigued by SKMC’s groundbreaking JeffMD curriculum, as well as opportunities to leverage Thomas Jefferson University’s strengths in science, design, and engineering. “I’m excited about the possibility of building teams of researchers and teachers who come from different backgrounds—engineering, design, medicine, nursing, medical school—and seeing if we can work together in a way that enhances how we deliver care.”

Providing mentorship opportunities is also top of mind for Ibrahim. “That’s how we sustain the scientific workforce and build the future community of investigators and physicians,” he says. “Traditionally, minority students and trainees and women did not receive the same mentoring as others, and that undermined our ability to build a more diverse community of scientists and physicians.”

Promoting diversity—and understanding diversity—will be a priority. Ibrahim sees that many communities, and the future generation in general, want a healthcare team that reflects the community they serve. “In order for us to address health equity, we have to diversify the people who provide care,” Ibrahim says. 

Jefferson has a long reputation for producing clinically superb physicians. Ibrahim shares, “Throughout my career in many different academic programs, every time that we got a medical student who came to us for residency from Jefferson, it was a big win.”

Now, Ibrahim hopes to add to that clinical expertise the human skills that build trust in the patient-physician relationship. Because ultimately, it’s all about taking care of patients.

The organization of Jefferson today—which includes 17 hospitals, a national university, the medical college, and an insurance arm—provides a unique framework for uniting, or reuniting, the business of healthcare with the academic and scientific base, which Ibrahim believes will enhance medical education as well as community impact. “To separate the patient care from the science and the academic work is, in my opinion, a problem,” he says. “I want to understand the challenges as well as the opportunities that exist that bridge that.”

Despite the challenges facing healthcare today, Ibrahim is excited about the road ahead for Jefferson. 

“Here’s an institution that’s getting ready to shape the next 200 years of its mission, and that includes education, research, and clinical care,” he says. “To be part of that conversation is fantastic.” 

Ibrahim has never lost sight of why he got into medicine in the first place. All those years ago, against an impoverished backdrop, he saw firsthand the impact one doctor could have on a community, on a people, and on a person. 

“Anything that I can do to advance human wellbeing, even if it’s a small thing, like training a young medical student to become a doctor, that’s what matters,” Ibrahim says. “That’s what gets me out of bed each day.”