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Research Grants Provide Physicians in Training With Unique Self-Assessment/Quality Improvement Tool

ABIM Foundation initiative exposes internal medicine doctors to quality improvement initiatives early in medical career; great potential for improvement in practice.

Philadelphia, December 19, 2006
PHILADELPHIA, December 19, 2006 – In an innovative effort to expose physicians to self- assessment and quality improvement early in their careers, and to evaluate the use of the American Board of Internal Medicine’s (ABIM) quality improvement tools in residency and fellowship training programs, the ABIM Foundation has awarded research grants to eight training programs nationwide. The grants, the first awards from the ABIM Foundation’s F. Daniel Duffy Small Grants Program, are targeted exclusively to residents, fellows, program directors and faculty in internal medicine and its subspecialties, and provide a unique research opportunity for residency and fellowship training programs.

The Duffy grants support research projects that evaluate the use of ABIM’s Practice Improvement Modules (PIMs) to enhance the training of residents and fellows in the two competencies of practice-based learning and improvement and systems-based practice that are essential to modern quality improvement. PIMs are web-based tools that enable physicians to conduct a confidential self-evaluation of the medical care that they provide. Use of PIMs allows for convenient and easy documentation of practice-based learning and systems-based practice – competencies that until now had been difficult to evaluate in training programs.

"After doing the Diabetes PIM, our residents were enthusiastic and felt invested in quality improvement," said Karen M. Chacko, MD, Program Director for the Primary Care Track and Associate Program Director for the Internal Medicine program at University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. "It was a wonderful opportunity for them to review what was happening in their own patient population, using relevant, readable and usable data. Because of their positive experience, they are likely to continue on a path toward quality improvement throughout their careers."

"By involving physicians in self-assessment and quality improvement during their training or early in their medical career, we believe they will be better prepared to continue on that pathway throughout their practice lifetime," said Eric S. Holmboe, MD, ABIM's Vice President of Evaluation & Quality Research. "These grants provide training programs with a comprehensive and unique learning experience and opportunity that does not exist elsewhere. In turn, the eight grantees will help the ABIM to learn more on how to best educate physicians-in-training in quality improvement."

The programs selected to receive F. Daniel Duffy grants are:

• St. Louis University Health Sciences Center
• University of California at Davis (Internal Medicine Residency)
• The University Hospital, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine (Fellowship in Cardiovascular Disease
• University of Colorado Health Sciences Center Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology)
• NY Hospital Presbyterian, Weill cornell Campus
• St. Mary's Medical Center, San Francisco
• University of of Vermont/Fletcher Allen Health Care
• Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia

The ABIM Foundation will fund 10 F. Daniel Duffy grants for 2006 and is accepting applications for the two remaining grants. More information is available at www.abimfoundation.org/duffygrants. The Duffy grants were named in honor of F. Daniel Duffy, MD, senior advisor to the president of ABIM, recognizing his outstanding contributions to ABIM and to the internal medicine profession.

About ABIM

The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) is an independent, not-for-profit organization that grants board certification -- a well accepted marker of physician quality -- to internists and subspecialists. Certification is a rigorous, comprehensive program for evaluating physician knowledge, skills and attitudes to assure both patients and payers that a physician has achieved competence for practice in a given field. Individual physician certification results may be found at www.abim.org.

About ABIM Foundation

The ABIM Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to reflecting and supporting medical professionalism, physician leadership, science-based medicine, and health care of the highest quality. Its mission is to advance medical professionalism and physician leadership in quality assessment and improvement by: exploring what it means for physicians to be professionals; stimulating physicians to become involved in quality assessment and improvement; bringing diverse groups of leaders together to enable dialogue and consensus; and promoting research into the science of quality evaluation and improvement.

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