Teaching Through Decades of Discovery
Over the course of a medical career, knowledge never stands still. Physicians provide care, continue to learn, and teach all at once, carrying discoveries forward for the next generation.
Dr. Philip Styne knows that process well. His career in hepatology spans more than four decades, including years in private practice, leadership in transplant hepatology, and service as a Chief Medical Informatics Officer. Alongside clinical care, teaching has always remained a constant.
Dr. Styne is on voluntary faculty at both the Florida State University College of Medicine and the University of Central Florida College of Medicine, building on prior faculty roles at the University of Texas and the University of Florida. Across these appointments, he has shared his expertise with generations of future physicians. While he now focuses his clinical work on two hepatology clinics in Orlando, his dedication to teaching remains as strong as ever, ultimately leading him to the MAVEN Project.
“I like being in the classroom with students,” he says, “but through MAVEN, I give lectures to people everywhere. Massachusetts, North Dakota, Seattle. The reach is quite a bit further than the local community.”
Through Interactive Learning Sessions, Dr. Styne teaches clinicians about diagnosis and treatment of liver disease and gastrointestinal conditions. One topic often takes center stage: hepatitis C.
When Dr. Styne began his medical career, this disease wasn’t fully understood.
“When I finished medical training,” he explains, “hepatitis C was not a diagnosis. These patients were called non-A, non-B because they didn’t have hepatitis A and they didn’t have hepatitis B, but we knew something was causing liver disease.”
Today, that once-mysterious illness has the potential to be one of medicine’s success stories. Treatments that once required a year of injections with difficult side effects and a cure rate of 50 percent has been replaced with a much simpler and effective treatment.
“Now they take a pill once a day for a few months,” Dr. Styne explains, “and the cure rate is about 95 percent.”
Those advances mean many patients no longer need to see a specialist for treatment. Instead, primary care physicians can diagnose and treat hepatitis C directly in their clinics, something Dr. Styne works to make possible through teaching, including those webinars and educational sessions with MAVEN. He enjoys watching the ripple effect of those efforts.
“Engaging primary care physicians to treat those patients is a main goal,” he said. “One provider starts treating hepatitis C and then another provider in the clinic says, ‘Oh, you’re doing that? Maybe I should too.’”
For many patients, especially those served by safety-net clinics, each additional step in the healthcare process creates another barrier and chance to lose them. A referral to a specialist might mean traveling to another office, waiting weeks for an appointment, or navigating insurance barriers.
“Every one of those steps, you lose patients,” Dr. Styne explains. “They drop off.”
By helping primary care physicians feel confident treating hepatitis C themselves, those barriers disappear. And when clinicians need reassurance, MAVEN offers another layer of support through specialist consults.
“Sometimes a provider just needs confirmation that they’re on the right track,” he says.
Today, Dr. Styne, among other medical professionals, are working toward the goal of eliminating hepatitis C as a public health threat by 2030, and his teaching through MAVEN is helping to move that goal forward.
“When you treat a patient, you’re treating the patient and the community,” he said, “and that’s the idea of eliminating the disease.”
For Dr. Styne, the work of sharing knowledge continues, because when one physician learns something new, the impact rarely stops there. It spreads, patient by patient, clinic by clinic, and community by community.
For his dedication to providing valuable, high-quality education to MAVEN Project’s partner safety-net clinics, Dr. Styne is being honored with the Laurie Green MD Educator Award. It is a fitting recognition for a physician whose career has spanned decades of clinical discovery and teaching, shaping the knowledge and skills of countless clinicians along the way.
