Melanie Stone, MPH, MEd
Assistant Director, Community Service Learning
UT Health San Antonio
Melanie Stone, MPH, MEd, directs the Community Service Learning (CSL) program through the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. This innovative program engages students and faculty at five health professional schools with community organizations to conduct service projects which benefit medically underserved populations in Texas. She is adjunct faculty at The University of Texas School of Public Health, San Antonio regional campus. Ms. Stone is passionate about public health and enjoys integrating a public health focus into an academic health science center. Her expertise is health literacy, and she helps bring health literacy awareness, knowledge, and skills to the future health care professional workforce. As a member of UTHSA’s Linking Interprofessional Networks for Collaboration faculty council, Melanie brings interprofessional education opportunities and resources to students. She is actively involved in the community, serves on the governing council of the Texas Public Health Association and is an alumni of Leadership San Antonio and Leadership Texas. Most recently, she became Vice-President of the newly formed Health Literacy Texas organization. Formerly, Ms. Stone supervised a community clinic outreach program, coordinated research for a large public health study, served as a public school teacher, and managed the outreach and education section of University Health System's CareLink program. She earned a bachelor's degree in biology and anthropology from Trinity University and master's degrees in public health from UT School of Public Health and education from Texas State University. She is currently in the doctor of public health degree program at UT School of Public Health.

Presenting at the Nexus Summit:

Effective communication with patients and other health professionals is paramount. Unfortunately, today’s students remain under-trained in health literacy communication. The importance of health literacy, combined with increasing accreditation expectations for interprofessional communication, affords a rich opportunity for interprofessional education (IPE). As a critical skill, health literacy IPE also provides an opportunity to assess advanced learning outcomes.We developed an interprofessional Objective Structured Clinical Examination (iOSCE) using standardized patients (SPs) and piloted it…