Close Up
Michael Hatton’s academic journey
Michael Hatton brings the clinical liaison between medicine and dentistry together for students. Photo: NANCY J. PARISI
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“I think our biggest foray has been to try and communicate well with the rest of the community and look at the patient as a whole patient and not just as a requirement for a dental student.”
It had been a long, strange trip for Michael Hatton before he arrived at UB in 1978. He spent seven years after high school as a guitarist and bassist in a rock ‘n roll band, then lived a life at sea as a commercial fisherman, catching everything from swordfish to shark up and down the East Coast.
He had reached a crossroads in his life and decided to pursue the study of biology, the one subject that enthralled him in the Catholic boys school that he had attended. After earning a crash BA in biological sciences at C.W. Post University on Long Island, where he grew up, Hatton came to UB’s School of Dental Medicine to become an oral surgeon, graduating magna cum laude in 1982 with a DDS and minors in oral medicine, oral pathology and oral surgery. Three years later, he earned his MS in oral biology here.
For the next two decades, he established a successful full-time private practice while teaching intermittently at the dental school. “I was told in 1982, when I graduated, that I should be in academics. All my teachers said, ‘you have a proclivity toward this stuff, you like research, working with students, teaching,’” he recalls. “But, I had a family to raise—eight children—and they cost a little bit more than a faculty member can afford. I was blessed to be able to go out in private practice, but had this open-door policy to come back and bring what I think are my basic talents and nature back into a learning environment.”
Now Hatton is back in academics full time as director of oral medicine, coming to the Department of Oral Diagnostic Sciences (ODS) in 2007 after limiting his practice (“I had to leave because, like a lot of surgeons, your back gives out after 20 years.”) to teach oral medicine and oral maxillofacial surgery.
“I always had a close communication here, having grown up with members of the department, like Dr. Norm Mohl and Dr. Alan Drinnan. When I came back to teach, I was able to bring that clinical component to primarily a diagnostic faculty that was more bent toward pathology and microscopic analysis,” he explains.
Hatton brings the clinical liaison between medicine and dentistry together for students. “We go right to the chair-side setting where the student is working and are able to dialogue about a patient’s medical condition, surgical history and the need for interventional therapeutics on surgical and medical,” he notes. “It’s a really good educational venue for the students to have it appear right there.”
Hatton immediately focused on the fact that the dental school’s patient population has gotten older—about 60 percent is over 60 and many are at co-morbidity in terms of diabetes, blood pressure and cardiac disease.
“One of the things we got going right away was a database so that every time an ODS faculty member has contact with a student and a patient, we have a list of 10 to 12 parameters as to why we saw that patient. Our database now has about 2,000 patient contacts at this point. That’s going to help us immensely in terms of understanding the frequency of need for our services, how we can best efficiently treat these patient,” he says.
Because about 14 percent of the school’s patient population is diabetic—which is double the national average—Hatton instituted the use of glucometers to take blood sugar measurements at the start of each dental visit, helping to stem the urgent codes that necessitated acute-care emergencies. This is done not only on known diabetic patients, but also on those patients who may have a high risk of having diabetes. “We’re in a position to screen and get back to the medical community and say we think your patient might have a problem,” Hatton says.
He also introduced the measurement of vital signs of each patient at the start of every visit. “This helps immensely to either attenuate the procedure or, if there is a code, to help us manage it,” Hatton observes. “The students happily have accepted this into their patient management beautifully. They view it as a more coherent way to look at a patient’s whole health. A lot of it is risk management—learning to manage the risk of your patient in your environment.”
Hatton characterizes the school as probably the largest ambulatory care facility in Western New York, with thousands of active patients. “In any one day, there may be 500 patients being attended to,” he relates. “We see so many folks in different parts of our community that we’re in a perfect setting to dialogue back into the medical community what that patient is doing as far as their health is concerned.
“I think our biggest foray has been to try and communicate well with the rest of the community and look at the patient as a whole patient and not just as a requirement for a dental student,” he says.
Hatton also has been trying to develop an oral medicine clinic in the school to monitor the care of non-cancerous lesions and tumors—a need to manage bony tumors that are seemingly benign but notoriously reoccur. The school does not have a clinic devoted to these peculiar problems in dentistry.
“It’s one of those niches of head-and-neck care that tends to get ignored because there’s not a lot of reimbursement in it,” he says. “It’s not cancer, but it’s far more common than cancer and could develop into cancer. We need the support of the administration of the school to put the financial wherewithal together as a service for the entire Western New York community. I look at this clinic as a multidisciplinary educational event and patient-care setting,” he says.
Hatton Is very optimistic with the arrival of Michael Glick as the new dental school dean, primarily because he is trained in oral medicine. “His concept of dentistry is that it’s one health science that helps the patient along with all of the other health sciences. It’s not an icon to itself and we have to dialogue with our colleagues in medicine and other disciplines in order to get the job done for the health of our community,” he notes.
Hatton lives near the dental school. His wife, Elizabeth, is a family physician. Their eight children range in age from 28 to 13. “One graduated from the University of Rochester and is applying to law school, one is a senior at Geneseo and applying to medical school, one is at Brockport and wants to go to veterinary school, one is a dental hygienist, two are professionally trained chefs, one is at St. Joe’s and wants to go into dentistry, and a 13-year-old who I have yet to figure out. We’ll help him along the way, though. He’s a spirited lad,” he says.
Music continues to play a vital role in the life of the former member of the rock band Lost Cause (“We lived up to our name.”) as he still plays the guitar daily, along with the Irish tin whistle. Hobbies also include scuba diving, sailing and martial arts instruction.
His retirement goal is to sail to the Caribbean islands and perform dental work for the many who are deprived. But that wish make take a while—right now, the director of oral medicine is on a mission to treat the whole health of the community by instilling the dental student with whole knowledge.
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