ABIM Foundation Summer Forum - Dialogue

ABIM Foundation
Summer Forum

The ABIM Foundation Summer Forums are designed to promote dialogue and decision-making among leaders in all sectors of health care.

The 2007 ABIM Foundation Forum

Recommendations from the 2006 Forum about the rising costs of care focused on patients with serious, chronic and complex conditions, and emphasized how coordination of care has been linked to improvements in both quality and efficiency. Care coordination is a window into the problems and solutions of today's U.S. health care system - the "missed opportunity" to tackle the implications, barriers and needed innovations to advance care coordination.

As a result, the 2007 Forum convened more than 120 health care leaders who addressed the topic, "Coordination of Care: Missed Opportunity?"

Goals of the 2007 forum included:

Increasing awareness of the problems patients with multiple chronic medical conditions face when receiving care in the United States.
Examining successful practice models of coordinated care and their effects on quality and efficiency.
Identifying strategies to create the needed structural and financing changes to support radical improvements in care coordination.
Identifying and coordinating the roles of organizations that can foster changes in care coordination.

Reports from the 2007 ABIM Foundation Summer Forum:

Care Coordination: Building Continuity In A Fragmented Health Care System
Coordination of Care: Missed Opportunity? (ppt 3mb)
Illustrations of key insights, observations and commentary

Forum Presentations:

Supplemental Materials:
The following excerpts from selected presentations and documents describing care coordination strategies provide greater detail on key points of interest.

Synthesis of the Literature on Care Coordination
White Space or Black Hole: What Can We Do To Improve Care Transitions (June 2007)
Taming Health Care inefficiency: Physicians & Others Explore Solutions (September 2006)
Joint Principles Statement for the Patient Centered Medical Home (Posted with permission of the patient-centered Primary Care Collaborative)
Transitional Care for Older Adults: A Cost-Effective Model
(Mary D. Naylor, PhD, RN, LDI Senior Fellow, Marian S. Ware, Professor in Gerontology, University of Pennsylvania, Volume 9, Number 6)
Abraham Verghese on the need for physicians to rediscover empathy for their patients
Carol Levine on the voice of the family caregiver

Note: The PDFs above are included with the permission of their respective sources. They are intended for the specific use of viewing or downloading a single copy. These martierals may not be reproduced, distribute or used for any commercial purpose.

The 2006 ABIM Foundation Summer Forum

The 2006 ABIM Foundation Summer Forum focused on "Efficiency in Health Care — Is There a Shared Vision?" As health care costs continue to rise, "efficiency" is increasingly at the center of national policy discussions. Thought leaders discussed and developed workable "real time" recommendations and strategies to achieve greater efficiency and reduce waste. Click for the report: Taming Health Care Inefficiency: Physicians and Others Explore Solutions.

The 2005 ABIM Foundation Summer Forum

The 2005 ABIM Foundation Summer Forum revolved around the implementation of Maintenance of Certification by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) boards and the issue of pay-for-performance. Forum participants discussed how to enhance health care system performance, a multi-prong accountability system, and agreed that physician participation is essential. Additionally, they recognized that pay-for-performance programs might enhance these systems and increase relevancy.