Dr. Victoria Kaprielian is a family physician, educator, scholar and advocate for interprofessional health care education. As an academician and clinician, she has worked closely with physicians, nurses, physician assistants, pharmacists, public health and physical therapist faculties, and students to improve team-oriented, collaborative care for patients. While at Duke University, she served briefly as the interim director of the Doctor of Physical Therapy Program. In 2015, she was elected to chair the Board of the National Commission on the Certification of Physician Assistants (NCCPA).
Dr. Kaprielian is originally from New York and describes her family as a quintessential American Dream story. The granddaughter of four refugees, she spent her early years in a South Bronx tenement before moving to the suburbs while her father literally worked his way up from the mail room to president of a Park Avenue advertising agency. Dr. Kaprielian received her BA from Brown University (1981) and her MD from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine (1985). She completed the Duke University-Watts Family Medicine Residency Program (1988). She returned to Duke University after completing a Clinician-Teacher Fellowship at UCLA (1989). At Duke, she held several key positions including Director of Predoctoral Education in Family Medicine, Director of Faculty Development, Director of Quality and Safety, and Vice Chair for Education in Community and Family Medicine. She helped design and implemented multiple innovative courses for the Duke University School of Medicine, including a clerkship in Cost-Effective Care and week-long intensives on Patient Safety, Aging and Chronic Disease, Clinical Oncology, Critical Care, and Disaster Preparedness. The last of these was Duke’s first interprofessional curricular program, involving medical, PA, DPT, and nursing students. Dr. Kaprielian then led development and implementation of the Interprofessional Introduction to Prevention, Duke’s first required interprofessional course for health sciences students. She regularly taught in the Duke PA program on topics such as billing and coding, patient safety, and medical malpractice. She was also deeply involved in Graduate Medical Education, and played a prominent role in the redesign of the Duke Family Medicine Residency Program.
Dr. Kaprielian left Duke University in 2013 to become the Associate Dean for Faculty Development & Medical Education and Professor of Family Medicine at the Jerry M. Wallace School of Osteopathic Medicine, Campbell University. There she played an integral role in the design and implementation of the entire Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine curriculum, as well as recruitment and development of faculty for the new school. She established the Standardized Patient program, and was founding Course Director for the 2-year Clinical Skills course series. She now directs the medical school course on Epidemiology and Population Health, and she is the lead instructor on Patient Safety and Quality Improvement. Dr. Kaprielian has also established a medical outreach program to Armenia, taking a team of medical students and faculty to Armenia each summer to provide medical service and cultural exchange. In collaboration with Campbell’s School of Public Health, she co-facilitates a Population Health Think Tank which aims to connect health science programs with local health agencies and priorities, to improve health status in Harnett county.
In 2019, Dr. Kaprielian created a federally-funded Primary Care Champions Fellowship* program to train primary care physicians and PAs as leaders in healthcare transformation and education. As of January, 2020, she also serves as founding director and designer of the Campbell Master of Health Professions Education, an interprofessional degree program to prepare health professionals of all disciplines as leaders and educators.
Dr. Kaprielian has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, written book chapters, and presented at both national and international meetings. Her primary academic interests focus around education, including innovative teaching methods and assessment of effectiveness of various educational modalities. Her clinical interests center on population health, quality improvement, and patient safety.
Dr. Kaprielian is also a Diplomate of the American Board of Family Medicine and a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians. She is a longstanding member of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, a TeamSTEPPS Master Trainer, and a former STFM/American Council on Education Marian Bishop Fellow. She serves as peer reviewer for multiple journals and in 2012 received the Outstanding Reviewer Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges MedEdPORTAL Publications. She is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha honor societies and in 2015 was named an Alpha Chi Omega Alumna Woman of Distinction.
Acknowledgments: This biography was written by Reginald Carter with the assistance of Dr. Victoria Kaprielian and was submitted to the Society in May 2020. Sources of information for this biography were excerpted from online biographical material contained on Duke University and Campbell University websites – primarily at https://fmch.duke.edu/profile/victoria-susan-kaprielian and https://directory.campbell.edu/people/victoria-kaprielian/. The portrait and other photographs are courtesy of Dr. Kaprielian.
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