Grants

To develop a learning experience and assessment methodology to help clinicians thoughtfully embrace and communicate clinical uncertainty in ways that build trust, the ABIM Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation awarded $360,000 in grants in 2023.

The funded projects include:

• A multidisciplinary team of experts from the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, the University of California – San Francisco, and the Australian National University will create a repository of existing resources and assessments focused on communicating about uncertainty in clinical settings, develop new training and assessment materials to supplement and connect the resources identified in the repository, and support a learning ecosystem by pilot testing the materials for different audiences at multiple training sites.
• The Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine will create a competency-based curriculum to teach learners the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to communicate effectively about uncertainty. It will include hands-on learning methods to help medical students and trainees communicate and collaborate with patients and with clinicians from across the care team.
• Arts Practica, an online educational program, and The Nocturnists, an award-winning medical storytelling program, will create and disseminate a six-episode podcast series. “Uncertainty in Medicine” will blend storytelling, conversation and education to provide a provocative listening experience that will help clinicians better handle uncertainty. 

Together with the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine (AAIM), the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), the ABIM Foundation, the American College of Physicians (ACP), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, we support projects intended to promote trust and create a more equitable health system by incorporating DEI into the fabric of internal medicine education and training.

• 2023
• 2022
• 2021

To help correct the scourge of medical misinformation which experienced a resurgence during the pandemic, especially among Black and Latino populations, the ABIM Foundation awarded $110,000 in grants in 2022.

Factchequeado and Cuidate/Take Care Annapolis were selected as the first- and second-place winners, respectively, by an expert panel of judges.

Factchequeado

Factchequeado seeks to combat Spanish-language misinformation in the United States, with a special focus on health care and public health. It has been formed by two leading organizations that are devoted to fact-checking in the Spanish-speaking world: Maldita.es (Spain, founded 2014) and Chequeado (Argentina, founded 2010). It creates original, verified content in Spanish that responds to false claims that are circulating in Spanish-speaking communities.

Until the launch of Factchequeado, there was no organized effort to address Spanish-language misinformation in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the need, as, for example, rumors spread that vaccination centers were a trap to deport immigrants.

The project has a particular focus on WhatsApp, which Spanish speakers commonly use for news consumption and sharing. With support from the ABIM Foundation, Factchequeado will create the capacity to monitor and respond to misinformation claims that are trending on WhatsApp. This will enable them to push high-quality information into an arena where misinformation is spreading, rather than depending on individuals to seek out correct health information on their own.

Factchequeado will also develop alliances with large and small Spanish-language media organizations and with fact checking organizations that currently produce little content in Spanish. It will provide these entities with content they can use for free, expanding its reach and enhancing the capacity of these organizations to serve their audiences.

As part of this work, the project team hopes to build a network of Spanish-language journalists in the U.S., empowering them to identify and debunk false claims. This will include conducting training sessions for journalists about identifying and addressing misinformation on health issues in Spanish.

Cuidate/Take Care Annapolis

Cuidate/Take Care Annapolis is a health education outreach program launched in August 2020 to provide community health education to the city’s most vulnerable populations. The program includes teams focused on the Hispanic community and on the Black community. Team members go door-to-door, offering culturally and linguistically appropriate educational materials (in English and Spanish), addressing health questions and concerns, and connecting families to food and other resources. For outreach to Hispanic communities, Cuidate enlists Annapolis-area residents who studied health professions in Latin America but have been unable to enter their field in the US.

The program staff also creates video and audio content that can be replicated and forwarded, and employs a texting platform to share COVID-19 and other health and resource updates with more than 1,000 community members. (With resources provided by ABIM Foundation, this will expand to 2,000 members.)

The ABIM Foundation grant will support the program as it takes on chronic health issues in addition to COVID-19. The project will add a communications coordinator to enhance its digital presence and create a strategic communications plan to guide the outreach teams. Ciudate will also launch a leadership development program to help empower communities to promote healthy habits and health care—including by addressing misinformation—in a culturally sensitive manner.

Honorable Mentions:

• PIRG
• Migrant Clinicians Network
• NYC Health & Hospitals
• Columbia
• Curious

2021

• ABIM Foundation awarded $15,000 to DiverseMedicine Inc. to evaluate the nationwide impact of its various diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Founded in 2011 to foster diversity in medicine through mentorship and motivation, the Dallas-based nonprofit creates and implements community programs to expose underrepresented students to the field of medicine.

2020

The ABIM Foundation awarded a total of $70,000 to three members of these groups so they can launch meaningful projects informed by discussions that began at the 2020 Forum:

• AFFIRM: The American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine (AFFIRM) is the nation’s leading nonprofit dedicated to ending the American firearm injury epidemic using a public health approach. By working with trusted messengers, including medical and public health partners, other nonprofit organizations, community members, law enforcement, and firearm industry leaders, AFFIRM has developed and piloted the Reframe program, which uses a combination of narratives and evidence to increase the understanding of firearm injury as a health problem.
  This grant will enable AFFIRM to create a “Reframe playbook” that will codify the Reframe program and include extensive materials that can be adapted for various concerns including firearm suicide, firearm domestic violence, firearm community violence, unintentional firearm injury, firearm targeted violence and mass shootings. The playbook will also include collated national resources and contact information for partner organizations.
• Center for Health Research Transformation (CHRT) at the University of Michigan: While public health and medical care have traditionally been siloed, the lack of connection between the two systems had serious consequences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health messages about the measures needed to keep people safe (e.g., masking and social distancing) were politicized, leading to distrust. And in too many communities, public health leaders had difficulty getting these messages heard and accepted. Many lives may have been saved had physicians and public health leaders worked together to share these guidelines and reinforce messages.
  There are also gaps in information and service delivery in the current primary care model that the public health system can likely help fill. And now there is a new openness to create a model for integrating public health and primary care that builds on the strengths of both. As primary care practices focus more on population health, public health services could have tremendous impact on improving the health of the communities these practices serve.
  This project will explore public health integration into the primary care team on the population health level and this grant will enable the CHRT project team to identify ways to measure and test the impact of this integration as well as explore its scalability and sustainability.
• The Leapfrog Group: Research has shown that patients from vulnerable populations experience harm from certain patient safety events in U.S. hospitals at a higher rate than non-vulnerable populations, subjecting these populations to both greater harm and to increased costs. Yet while many purchasers, clinicians and hospitals may ascribe disparities to cultural forces outside their immediate control, they rarely have the data available to estimate how disparities affect the specific populations they are responsible for. As a result, key stakeholders maintain support for action in a general sense but do not take actions within their own enterprises—even though such action could accelerate immediate improvement.
  This grant will enable The Leapfrog Group to explore the feasibility of expanding its Lives & Dollars Lost Calculator to estimate lives lost and dollars wasted due to racial, ethnic and language-based disparities in harm from patient safety events. The goal of the calculator is to help purchasers, providers and hospitals recognize the harm to vulnerable populations and how that harm wastes resources within their own sphere of responsibility.

2016-2018

The ABIM Foundation, in partnership with the Council of Medical Specialty Societies, is funding four projects designed and led by practicing physicians with promising ideas for overcoming an obstacle that inhibits them from performing their work per the principles and professional commitments defined in the Physician Charter.

Grantees from the following organizations were selected to receive $25,000 to implement a project to foster professionalism. The grants run from April 2016 through March 2018.

• Albany (Georgia) Area Primary Health Care: Despite the success of worldwide immunization interventions, U.S. adult immunization rates have remained low and exhibit racial and ethnic disparities for many routinely recommended vaccines. To address this situation locally, Albany Area Primary Health Care, a physician-led, federally qualified health center reaching a predominately African American, underserved population in southwest Georgia, will focus on improving adult immunization rates by expanding the use of Georgia’s immunization registry (GRITS) in its practice. As the use of registries can increase immunization rates by consolidating vaccination records from multiple physicians, project leaders will utilize a coordinator to assess accuracy of GRITS information and develop clinician trainings to encourage its use.
• Henry Ford Hospital: Recognizing that effective physician conversations about treatment options can help intensive care unit (ICU) patients and family members make more informed decisions, Henry Ford Hospital will expand the use of a communications model called “CLEAR” ( Connect-Listen-Empathize-Align-Respect) to all units of the medical ICU. The model includes communication skills training, bedside training and in-unit integration by staff to help improve communication among the entire care team, including physicians, physicians-in-training and nurses.
• Paoli Hospital: Citing the difficulties physicians often express when balancing technological demands during patient interactions, as well as associated burnout rates, an interprofessional team at Paoli Hospital will create a project aimed at identifying how the current use of technology presents barriers to delivering patient care and potential improvements to workflow. By exploring new ways of using technology, project leaders believe they can improve physician satisfaction, morale and professionalism, all in service of providing better care for patients.
• University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA): Choices made by critical care specialists—who often treat the sickest patients with the most intensive and expensive treatments—have not only clinical consequences but also resource implications. A previous physician survey evaluation found that some patients in UCLA ICUs received treatment that physicians found to be ineffective, but that physicians did not want to deny requests from families for such care. Building on this work, critical care specialists working with the Advance Care Planning program at UCLA plan to (a) track physicians’ ability to avoid providing inappropriate care; (b) discuss cases in which inappropriate care may have been delivered; and (c) host learning sessions about how to approach situations in which patients and families request inappropriate treatments.