2010

The ABIM Foundation works with the American Academy of Nursing to advance team-based care for the chronically ill in ambulatory settings and convenes a meeting to develop a set of professional competencies for team-based care.

The ABIM Foundation funds research to explore and develop performance measurement methods to evaluate the effectiveness of comprehensive care models, such as patient-centered medical homes.

• The research finds that using a measurement tool to qualify medical homes without quality measures would not result in uniform improvements of quality. Health Affairs and Health Services Research publish the results that provide important information for policy makers considering the expansion of the patient-centered medical home model in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The ABIM Foundation co-sponsors the May 2010 special issue of Health Affairs, “Reinventing Primary Care” and co-sponsors an accompanying press briefing, broadcast on C-SPAN. More than 300 stakeholders attend the briefing, which results in a number of follow-up stories.

• The Health Affairs issue includes an article authored by ABIM staff presenting the findings of a field study on how teams work—or don’t—in primary care. They report that for practices to succeed in managing diverse patients and help them understand and manage their own health, it is critical to organize teams with shared roles and responsibilities.

The 2010 annual Forum, Transforming Medical Education and Training to Meet the Needs of Patients and Society addresses the need for a social compact for medical education and clinical training to maintain a high-performing, evolving health care system.

• The Principles for the Social Compact for Medical Education and Training (pdf) articulates expectations for training the physician workforce needed to support 21st-century health care and what society needs to contribute in turn.
• Forum participants initiate a number of follow-up activities in the areas of:
• Learning and assessing competencies
• Transforming primary care
• Using graduate medical education (GME) funds to drive performance and innovation
• The promotion of inter-professional education, evaluation, assessment and accreditation.
• A February 2011 perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine calls for a transformation of the GME system to ensure the sustainability of the U.S. health care system in light of the country’s growing geriatric population.

The ABIM Foundation establishes the Benson Scholarship in honor of John Benson Jr., MD, past President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and an Institute of Medicine (IOM) member.

	The goal of the Benson Scholarship is to enable talented, early-career health science scholars to participate actively in the work of the IOM and to further their careers as future leaders in the field. The ABIM Foundation names Seth Glickman, MD, MBA as the 2010 Anniversary Fellow.
John Benson Jr, MD

2009

The 2009 annual Forum, Achieving Equity, Affordability and Quality: The Indispensable Role of Payment Reform, produces a set of principles for physician payment reform to help drive greater quality, efficiency and accountability in health care.

The ABIM Foundation Putting the Charter into Practice grant program provides grants to organizations exploring concepts in professionalism and identifying best practices to advance it among practicing physicians.

• Six grants are awarded in 2009. 
• Five new grants are awarded in 2011.

2008

The 2008 annual Forum, From Rhetoric to Reality: Achieving Patient-Centered Care, explores concepts of patient-centered care.

Forum participants shared their personal experiences as patients and caregivers through the publication of Shared Wisdom. Donald Berwick, MD, then President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, authors the most cited Health Affairs article of 2009 based on his Kimball Lecture. A second article resulting from the Forum appears in a 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The article articulates the need for physicians to better gauge their patients’ understanding of their medical situation and respect and respond to their preferences for treatment.

The ABIM Foundation, along with the Commonwealth Fund and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, fund the Society of General Internal Medicine, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine and the Academic Pediatric Association to convene a series of meetings and develop a policy-relevant research agenda for the patient-centered medical home.

• The project results in six papers published in a special issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2010 and culminates in a two-day meeting of approximately 150 health care experts. The papers are presented at the meeting and the research agenda is further refined at a series of small group discussion sessions and panels.

The ABIM Foundation funds a study exploring whether performance measures during residency training predict the likelihood of future disciplinary actions against practicing internists.

• The results of the study are published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and conclude that poor performance on behavioral and cognitive measures during residency are associated with greater risk for state licensing board actions against practicing physicians at every point on a performance continuum. The findings support the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education standards for professionalism and cognitive performance and the development of best practices to remediate these deficiencies.

2007

The 2007 annual Forum Care Coordination: Is There a Missed Opportunity? identifies successful strategies and changes needed for the health care system to improve care coordination.

2006

The 2006 annual Forum Efficiency in Health Care – Is There a Shared Vision? stimulates interest in assessing physicians’ ability to avoid unnecessary or harmful interventions.

• The Forum culminates in an issue brief that explores inefficiencies in the health care system and identifies supply, physician behavior, patient demands and operational waste as opportunities to impact costs. The brief advances the concept of practice improvement modules as an opportunity to measure resource use as part of physician assessments.

The ABIM Foundation funds the creation of a tool called the Professionalism Mini-Evaluation Exercise (P-MEX) to evaluate behaviors reflective of professionalism and identify areas for development.

2005

The ABIM Foundation establishes the Kimball Scholar program to honor the substantive contributions of Harry Kimball, MD, MACP to ABIM, internal medicine and its subspecialties, and to the profession as a whole. Dr. Kimball is a former President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and the ABIM Foundation.

Past Kimball Scholars include:

• Jeanette Mladenovic, MD
• Barbara Turner, MD
• Michael Green, MD
• Hoangmai Pham, MD
• Shiphra Ginsburg, MD, MEd

The ABIM Foundation convenes more than 100 leaders in health care at its annual Forum, Physician Leadership and the Role of Board Certification in Assuring Quality and Accountability. Participants discuss physician leadership and the role of board certification in assuring quality and accountability.

• The 2005 Forum initiates work that leads to certifying boards developing arrangements to start recognizing Maintenance of Certification in pay-for-performance measures.

The Stepping Up to the Plate Alliance is established to address the issue of care transitions and hospital readmissions. The Alliance is led by the ABIM Foundation, supported by the Commonwealth Fund and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and comprised of nine specialty societies.

• The Alliance produces a set of principles and standards focused on care transitions between hospitals and primary care physicians aimed at reducing readmissions.
• Ten specialty societies endorse the principles and standards. The American College of Physicians, Society of Hospital Medicine, Society of General Internal Medicine and Society of Academic Emergency Medicine use them as a resource to draft their own principles.
• The ABIM Foundation and others persuade and sponsor the Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement to convene a working group to develop measures based on these standards. Four measures on care transitions were endorsed by the National Quality Forum.
• In 2011, the ABIM Foundation provides funding to the American College of Physicians to develop a care transitions module that will be a part of the ACP Medical Home Builder.

The Macy Foundation and the ABIM Foundation fund research on the quality of care provided to older adults using the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Care of the Vulnerable Elderly (CoVE) Practice Improvement Module.

The research concludes that significant gaps in the quality of care for older adults exist and are much more pronounced in the residency clinic setting. Patients from the residency clinic sample are also less likely to report receiving guidance and interventions for important aspects of geriatric care than patients from a sample of practicing physicians.

To date, the research has resulted in two peer-reviewed manuscripts:

• In 2009, Academic Medicine publishes a study highlighted by the John A. Hartford Foundation and presents to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) to inform their recommendations for improvements in medical education and training to Medicare.
• In 2011, a second study examines older patients’ experience with care in residency clinics.

The ABIM Foundation funds a seed grant to explore how to work with primary care specialty societies and specialty boards to improve performance in practice. The Improving Performance in Practice Initiative provides improvement coaches for smaller practices to help them engage in quality improvement.

• The success of the initiative leads to a $5.5 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the American Board of Medical Specialties.
• As a result of the ABIM Foundation’s leadership, more than 400 practices, 1,400 physicians and 17 Beacon Communities are now working toward improving performance in practice across the country.

2004

The task force finds that the policies governing these relationships are lax and ignore important issues, such as disclosure, speaker’s bureaus, ghostwriting and reimbursements for food, gifts and travel.

2003

The ABIM Foundation launches the Putting Quality Into Practice initiative. The initiative identifies small physician practices that use data to make quality improvements, and finds increased physician satisfaction for those who make such improvements.

A study resulting from this initiative finds that physicians report renewed energy and sense of fulfillment when they focus on management of information, treatment of chronic conditions and redesigning of office work patterns. The Putting Quality Into Practice instructional video series on creating changes in practice has been viewed more than 7,000 times. It remains in active use by the American College of Physicians and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

The Kimball Lecture is created to honor Harry Kimball, MD, MACP, a board certified internist. Dr. Kimball served as President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the ABIM Foundation from 1991 to 2003.

As the centerpiece of its opening day agenda, the Kimball Lecture sets the stage for the annual ABIM Foundation Forum. Kimball Lecturers are selected for their influence and leadership in health care. Kimball Lecturers have included*:

2002

The ABIM Foundation, American College of Physicians Foundation and European Federation of Internal Medicine publish Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium: A Physician Charter.

The Physician Charter has been endorsed by more than 130 organizations with more than 100,000 distributed worldwide. Since the release of the Physician Charter, the number of yearly journal articles focused on medical professionalism has increased nearly threefold. The Physician Charter is used in white coat ceremonies and as a blueprint for designing medical school curricula. A 2007 article published in Annals of Internal Medicine relates a study of how well physicians model behaviors extolled in the Physician Charter. As of 2011, according to Google Scholar and Books, 956 articles and 412 books cite the Physician Charter.

1999

The ABIM Foundation is charged with advancing medical professionalism to improve health care.