Exclusive: A new hospital watchdog and evaluator will be launched Wednesday by the medical policy group Do No Harm, which pledged to strip wokeness and divisive politics from American medicine.
The center, known as the Center for Accountability in Medicine, will launch its new rankings, which are based on apolitical and statistically-driven criteria, as it seeks to restore integrity to American healthcare. According to the initial rankings, the University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine received the only perfect score of 100. Other top medical schools listed include NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, UPenn’s Perelman School of Medicine, the University of Michigan’s medical school, and the University of Central Florida College of Medicine.
The launch of the Center for Accountability in Medicine is described by Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, founder of Do No Harm, as a ‘major step forward’ in achieving the group’s mission to ‘restor[e] integrity to medicine.’ He explained that the center will focus on ensuring that the medical institutions training future physicians prioritize patients, not partisan politics.
Dr. Ian Kingsbury, director of the new center, told Fox News Digital that the rankings are urgently needed to ‘combat the tide of wokeness in healthcare.’ He emphasized the need to ‘eliminate DEI’s divisive influence in medicine’ and to ‘recognize medical schools that focus on excellence and expose those that promote political activism.’
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 if it does incorporate DEI into its academic calculus. The academic excellence section analyzes average undergraduate GPAs, with schools in the top quintile of such statistics earning 30 points. Transparency of grading, with points awarded for grading systems that include performance tiers like ‘honors,’ is also assessed. Institutions with an active chapter of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society receive additional points.
According to the center’s findings, some schools in California, New Mexico, Oregon, and Michigan ranked near the bottom, while others, including NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, UPenn’s Perelman School of Medicine, the University of Michigan’s medical school, and the University of Central Florida College of Medicine, made the top five. The center writes that proponents of DEI wrongly argue that it ‘enhances cultural competence and addresses health disparities.’ Do No Harm views DEI as essentially lowering academic standards in exchange for nonmedical criteria and as inserting politics into medicine.
Other similar organizations have varying stances on DEI in medical schools. Some support it, while others do not demerit schools that enforce such considerations. The center’s mission is to ensure that medical institutions are held accountable for maintaining merit and expertise, over ideological agendas. The initiative is a continuation of the group’s previous efforts to challenge institutions over programs that discriminate against any group or class of people, which have led to ‘unprecedented success in rooting out divisive identity politics from healthcare.’ The new Center for Accountability in Medicine is expected to build on that work.