ABIM Foundation Focus – Spring 2017

Professionalism Article Prize

The winners of the seventh annual John A. Benson Jr., MD Professionalism Article Prize were announced on April 25. The winning articles explored timely issues and challenges facing the medical profession, including how physicians and medical educators can recognize and confront racism; ways to provide better health care service to vulnerable populations; and avenues to integrate professionalism into the medical education of future physicians.

Articles that received the award are:

  • Remembering Freddie Gray: Medical Education for Social Justice” by Delese Wear, PhD, Joseph Zarconi, MD, Julie M. Aultman, PhD, Michelle R. Chyatte, DrPH, and Arno K. Kumagai, MD. In this August 2016 Academic Medicine perspective, the authors explore recent high-profile killings of young black men and how patients’ experience may differ drastically from the lives of medical students tasked with caring for them.
  • Structural Racism and Supporting Black Lives — The Role of Health Professionals” by Rachel R. Hardeman, PhD, MPH, Eduardo M. Medina, MD, MPH, and Katy B. Kozhimannil, PhD, MPA. Published in the December 2016 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, this perspective highlights how structural racism can undermine health care workers’ best efforts to provide equal care.
  • Parting the Clouds: Three Professionalism Frameworks in Medical Education” by David M. Irby, MDiv, PhD, and Stanley J. Hamstra, PhD. Published in the April 2016 issue of Academic Medicine, this piece outlines three frameworks that have evolved in the medical education community to teach professionalism.

 

Creating Value Challenge Winners

On March 28, the ABIM Foundation, Costs of Care and the Leapfrog Group announced the winners of the Creating Value Challenge, a competition aimed at recognizing innovative ideas and projects for teaching and implementing high-value health care among collaborative teams of clinicians, educators, quality improvement specialists and health system administrators.

Focused on implementing high-value care in clinical practice, the Creating Value winners are:

  • Linking Quality and Costs – Team-based, Physician-led Care Redesign for Top 50 Medical Conditions using Value-Driven Outcomes”—University of Utah Health Care initiated an enterprise-wide effort to improve clinical outcomes and reduce costs by building a tool to manage, analyze, and report data, called Value-Driven Outcomes.
  • Prevention Prescription”—Rami Farraj, MD, Chairman of the Royal Health Awareness Society and an internist at the King Hussein Medical Center in Jordan, shared a simple yet effective project that encourages primary care physicians to write a “prescription” for their patients to attend interactive awareness sessions before their next appointment. During these sessions patients learn new skills to empower them to live healthy lifestyles and avoid chronic diseases.

Teaching Value winners focused on improving medical education curricula around delivering high-value care:

Honorable mention was awarded to “Use of Simulation to Assess Incoming Interns’ Recognition of Opportunities to Choose Wisely”—The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine modified its “Room of Horrors” simulation to address four areas of health care overuse articulated by Choosing Wisely® specialty society recommendations.
 

Professionalism Research: Creating Bold & New Directions

On March 27 and 28, leading experts in professionalism gathered at the ABIM Foundation to discuss the state of research on medical professionalism and plot future directions, ultimately producing and presenting a set of five research ideas that could offer a useful direction for the field.

Among the highlights from the meeting:

  • Richard Frankel, PhD, Professor of Medicine and Geriatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, discussed the relevance to professionalism research of Thomas Kuhn’s landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
  • A dialogue between Fred Hafferty, PhD, Associate Director of the Program in Professionalism and Ethics at Mayo Clinic, and Tait Shanafelt, MD, Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic, centered on the latter’s landmark research on physician well-being and how he built his research program to define the problem, characterize the implications, and develop and test interventions to drive improvement.
  • Adina Kalet, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine and Surgery at NYU School of Medicine, gave a presentation about professionalism research at NYU, where she and colleagues are studying cohorts of undergraduate and graduate medical students.

Over the course of the two-day meeting, participants gathered in small groups and were tasked with discussing the current state of professionalism research, considering what we do and do not know and what we need to know. They also performed a professionalism research mapping exercise and developed ideas for future professionalism research.

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