ABIM Foundation Focus – Summer 2018

[Re]Building Trust: The ABIM Foundation Forum

At this year’s ABIM Foundation Forum, which was held in New Mexico in July, health care leaders came together to consider the importance of trust and strategies for building and rebuilding it across a variety of health care relationships.

Adam Berinsky, PhD, the Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT, delivered the Forum’s Kimball Lecture. He discussed the dramatic drop in public confidence in experts and expertise, a decline that manifested itself in decreased public confidence in medical science. He said that his research demonstrated that appeals to authority no longer persuaded the public, and noted that there were few proven solutions to addressing skepticism. Berinsky also noted that one of the few tactics that did show promise in addressing misinformation was the use of statements that appear to contradict the speaker’s self-interest. For example, he said that the most effective way to persuade the public that the Affordable Care Act had not created “death panels” was to quote a Republican officeholder denying their existence.

Other speakers at the three-day event addressed:

• the importance of trust in health care; describing the evidence that it makes people more likely to engage in healthful behaviors, enables innovation, and helps society respond to public health crises and other epidemics.
• trust levels among racial and ethnic minority groups in the health care system, implicit bias among clinicians, and opportunities for improvement.
• how to build reciprocal trust between clinicians and patients.
• health care reporting, its strengths, and how it could be improved to contextualize scientific developments to avoid sensationalism or misinformation.
• how to build trust in health care systems among patients and employees.

This year’s meeting was designed to inform the Foundation’s new strategic focus on issues of trust, and the proceedings will influence our programmatic activity in the coming years. Indeed, during one meeting session, participants advised the Foundation’s Board of Trustees and staff about the activities they would recommend. Suggestions included developing a “Trustworthy Health Care” and/or “Trustworthy Hospital” campaign to highlight trustworthy behaviors that practices and hospitals could adopt; training clinicians and patients in communications skills needed to create trustworthy encounters; convening experts to develop measures of trustworthiness; and helping practitioners understand disparities issues.

Foundation participants also met in small groups to discuss specific areas of trust, such as patient trust in health systems and medical groups, physician/clinician relationships, clinician/health system relationships and trust of underrepresented minorities in the health system. Each group plans to produce an article on its topic and submit it for publication in peer-reviewed journals.

The ABIM Foundation Announces New Board of Trustees

On July 1, 2018 the ABIM Foundation Foundation welcomed a new member and announced new roles to its Board of Trustees. The complete 2018 ABIM Foundation Board of Trustees and its officers include:

• Chair: Christine Sinsky, MD, Vice President of Professional Satisfaction at the American Medical Association
• Immediate Past Chair: Elizabeth A. McGlynn, PhD, Vice President for Kaiser Permanente Research and Executive Director of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Effectiveness & Safety Research (CESR)
• Vice Chair: Jackie Judd, Health Care Communications Consultant
• Secretary-Treasurer: David B. Reuben, MD, Director of the Multicampus Program in Geriatrics Medicine and Gerontology and Chief, Division of Geriatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Health Sciences
• Richard J. Baron, MD, President and CEO, American Board of Internal Medicine and ABIM Foundation
• Clarence H. Braddock, III, MD, MPH, Vice Dean for Education in the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles
• Frederick P. Cerise, MD, MPH, President and Chief Executive Officer of Parkland Hospital & Health System
• Patricia M. Conolly, MD, Associate Executive Director of The Permanente Medical Group (TPMG) and Executive Vice President for IT for the Permanente Federation
• John G. Harold, MD, Clinical Professor of Medicine in the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles; Attending Physician, Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute
• Sharon A. Levine, MD, Director, Geriatric Educational Innovations and Professor of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine
• Gregory P. Poulsen, MBA, Senior Vice President, Policy for Intermountain Healthcare
• Anita Samarth, CEO and Co-founder of Clinovations Government + Health
• Antonia M. Villarruel, PhD, RN, FAAN, Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and Director of the School’s WHO Collaborating Center for Nursing and Midwifery Leadership

ABIM Foundation Joins Coalition to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine

On September 13, ABIM Foundation and the American Board of Internal Medicine announced their participation in the Coalition to Improve Diagnosis with the launch of a new initiative, “ACT for Better Diagnosis.”

The coalition is a group of more than 40 leading health care and patient advocacy organizations convened by the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine. This new initiative aims to improve the Accuracy, Communication and Timeliness of diagnosis by identifying and spreading practical steps that everyone throughout the health care system—patients, physicians, nurses, health system leaders, laboratory scientists and others—can take to improve diagnosis.

For more information and a list of participating organizations, visit www.BetterDiagnosis.org.

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