Nondorf Appointed Director of UCMC Patient Admissions
By Alex Dunlap
Feb. 20, 2014
James G. Nondorf, the Univeristy of Chicago’s Dean of College Admissions and Financial Aid, has been appointed the first Director of Patient Admissions for the University of Chicago Hospitals, President Robert J. Zimmer announced on Thursday. Nondorf will take office at the end of the year.
Nondorf’s post, which was authorized last month by the Board of Trustees, was created to “increase the caliber of patients admitted to the UC Hospitals system,” Zimmer said in a statement. “Although UC Hospitals is a world-class medical research institution, its admissions policy is only considered ‘moderately selective’ by experts in hospital admissions, which brings down its prestige in the eyes of the nation’s top prospective patients,” he continued. “Our hope is that an increase in applications combined with a more selective admissions process will increase the desirability of our top-tier treatment programs.”
Nondorf announced that he had already begun the planning process for a series of reforms to be implemented in the UC Hospitals admissions process. “Currently, prospective UC Hospitals patients are evaluated primarily through a handful of standardized tests, including heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and secondarily through subjective evaluation by an admissions physician,” Nondorf said. He said that he planned to make the process both more rigorous and more comprehensive by requiring applicants to submit two letters of recommendation, scores from an SAT Subject Test, and a list of volunteer activities in which the prospective patient has recently participated.
Aides to Nondorf also indicated that a “supplement” to the application is under consideration in which prospective patients will be required to respond with at most two pages to one of a selection of “uncommon” essay prompts. Topics under consideration include, “Where does it really hurt?”, “Tell us about your gall bladder’s friends,” and “People throughout history have judged everything from Louisiana to exotic snakes to be worth the price. What would you pay an arm and a leg for, and why?” Nondorf hoped, aides reported, that such prompts would encourage applications from “the sort of quirky, twisted, perhaps even sick personalities that have long characterized the patient population of UC Hospitals.”
Commenters on the popular hospital admissions forum HospitalConfidential were largely positive about the coming changes. “Glad to see that UC Hospitals is stepping up its admissions game. Last year I heard their emergency department was just taking people from off the street because of low application numbers – practically anyone without a pulse can get in,” wrote AdmissionsGuru383, a forum regular. IGotIn2, a sporadic poster, considered accepting an offer from UC Hospitals last year, but opted for Northwestern Memorial instead because “it just seemed more legit – like a place people really try hard to get admitted to,” he wrote.
Rumors of a groundbreaking financialaid program, tentatively titled “UCHospitals Promise,” aiming to increase the percentage of UC Hospitals patients hailing from anywhere near Chicago, were swiftly denied by a spokesman for Dean Nondorf.
