GME Funding

A recent post from the NY Times discusses the issue of the physician workforce of the future.  I believe it accurately describes some of the concerns about GME training.  Yes, GME training is indeed the bottleneck by which new physicians come into the workforce.  Yes, we need new physicians (and other health care professionals) to care for an aging population.  We especially need primary care physicians for this, but we also need general surgeons, many types of subspecialists, and we need physicians to go into underserved areas, particularly rural areas.

There are bills that, if passed, could help fund more GME slots.  Dr. Atul Grover from the AAMCdescribes them well here in this post.  Residency programs accredited by the ACGME take new graduates from medical school, and appropriately train them to go out and practice medicine independently.  I also personally disagree with a proposal from Missouri that advocates for "assistantphysicians".  Simply put, these graduates need adequate training (a minimum of 3-4 years for most residency programs, with some like neurosurgery taking as long as 7-8 years), and that is what GME provides.

Please advocate for future GME funding: it is the best way to begin to create a physician workforce that will help care for our society.

Graduate Medical Education: Successes Despite Challenges

In a post a few days ago, Dr. J Russell Strader, in a post entitled “Why graduate medical education is failing”, described concern over graduates of residency in the current era, compared with those who trained in a different era.  He opines that many current residents feel, in his words, “woefully unprepared” for the realities of practice and have a “lack of ability to work independently”.  While his specialty of cardiology, a mix of a “procedural specialty” and a “cognitive specialty”, is slightly different from mine (primarily cognitive), I have a few thoughts about graduate medical education (GME) that paint a different picture.

 The current residents in training now did not “ask” for the duty hour restrictions.  The duty hour restrictions were placed on them, not the other way around.  Program directors themselves are in a quandary to produce competent graduates while still adhering to restrictions with which they may or may not agree.   For example, what should I do when a resident chooses of her own volition to stay over on duty hours by 25 minutes to finish discussing end-of-life concerns with a family of an ill intensive care unit patient?  I personally applaud such residents for understanding the bigger picture (for the record, a scenario such as this IS allowed by the current duty hour regulations).

Current program directors have to make the following statement on every one of their graduates and "sign off" on each resident at the time of graduation: “This graduate is competent to practice [SPECIALTY] independently without supervision.”  The current era of competency-based medical education, administrated through the Milestones initiative will likely demonstrate that some residents need longer training times while others will prove appropriate competency earlier.  The focus, of course, is to produce physicians who truly are ready to practice unsupervised, as the ACGME is accountable to the public.

The current generation of residents seem to describe a greater interest in caring for the underserved and global health initiatives than previous generations (this is purely anectodal based on applicants I have interviewed over the past 10 years).  This may be multifactorial, due to factors such as newer curricular opportunities in these areas that may not have existed many years ago.

The current residency and fellowship training programs still place great emphasis on “thinking like a doctor” and other clinical decision-making curricula, and have many novel curricular tools to evaluate residents in this regard.  

So what might we take from all of this?

First, I believe that the current generation of trainees is as dedicated as any other to the provision of outstanding patient care.  This generation has many competing demands and barriers to that care that simply did not exist 10 or more years ago, and they are handling it as best as they can.  They are not lazy!

Second, the concept of supervision, which has always existed, has nevertheless evolved over the years, necessitating more oversight by current attendings.  Attitudes such as “If I had to call the attending for help, it was a failure” might now be (and should be) a minority opinion, as the field of patient safety now demands more intensive supervision from attending physicians.

Third, the ACGME has moved towards a concept of “graded supervision”, meaning PGY1 residents should have more oversight than those 3 months from graduation.  The amount of supervision diminishes as time progresses through the training program.  This is different from the mentality of “let’s crush them during intern year so that they are REALLY ready as upper level residents” which was likely the pervasive mentality.  Of course a consequence of this may lead to some residents taking longer to feel comfortable as a supervisory PGY2 resident.

Fourth, the concept of life-long learning means that someone does not know “everything” once she/he begins practice.  It is, after all, the “practice” of medicine, and we all are always learning (even many years after training is completed).  This concept of lifelong learning can even be taught.  There is nothing wrong with newly minted clinicians thinking: “Can I run this patient care scenario past you?”  In fact, it is probably safer for patients to have another opinion when one clinician is doubtful as to diagnostic or therapeutic plans.  This is best described as “knowing when you don’t know something”.  The danger of course lies in the physician who “doesn’t know what she/he doesn’t know.”

My colleague Teresa Chan also outlined her thoughts on this same post earlier today, and provides a truly compelling argument why graduate medical education is succeeding in producing competent physicians ready to practice independently and unsupervised.  Like Dr. Chan, I am very proud of the “products” of the current GME environment, and feel that patient care has improved over the years as the graduate medical education community has evolved in not only what it teaches to residents but also how it teaches.

Advocacy in Academic Medicine

Today’s blog covers advocacy from a variety of angles, and reflects my thoughts over what I learned from the #AAMC13 meeting over the last 24 hours.

Advocacy within Social Media

The University of Utah is taking a huge presence at this meeting with its Innovations theme.  At a booth set up in the exhibit hall, they were interviewing folks coming through to provide brief reflections.  I was able to spend a few moments reflecting on what the impact that social media can have on medicine and medical education.  What a timely opportunity to focus on what so many great folks have done parlaying the importance of vaccines for communities, as well as providing truthful, succinct messages to society.  See the audio interview here.

Advocacy within Education

Daphne Koller, who started Coursera, spoke to the participants on the power of what MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) can do, not just for the schools or professors who host them, but for society as well.  I was moved by the stories from student learners from sub-saharan Africa and others who became more educated from their use of Coursera.  The potential ramifications of the betterment of the entire planet: wow!

Advocacy within Continuing Education

I attended a workshop on CME in which Don Moore described a tool that integrates the IHI Model for Improvement with PI CME (Performance Improvement CME) to help clinicians better understand the pieces needed to make improvement science and lifelong learning relevant to their day-to-day practice.  Some in the community have questioned how Maintenance of Certification actually “helps” them provide better care for their patients.  This session helped clarify the potential benefits of the Maintenance of Certification program.  We also heard from Mary Turco and George Blike about a concept at Dartmouth called “Value Grand Rounds”, which itself showcases improvements in the health system, but also itself has the opportunity for members of a team to see the fruits of their labor, and also drives them to want to get better.

Advocacy for Research

At the Town Hall meeting, Dr. Darrell Kirch answered questions from the audience about a variety of topics.  One comment hit home: the public is “scientifically illiterate”.  A new initiative by the AAMC entitled “Research Means Hope” focuses on how the public can better understand why research funding is so desparately needed, because the end product of research should be improved patient livelihood. 

Advocacy for Graduate Medical Education

Also at the Town Hall meeting, a question was raised about the “rate limiting step” in producing new physicians in the United States—namely, the shortage of residency positions for graduates of medical schools, who themselves have increased enrollment by 25-30% over the past few years.  Atul Grover discussed bills in Congress that aim to address the “GME crisis”: HR 1180, HR 1201, and Senate 577.  We hope that these campaigns can be successful in providing the resources for the physicians of the future, hoping to achieve the ultimate goal of improved patient outcomes in our communities.

Advocacy for Me

I was honored to have met Dr. Lewis First as well, the editor of the journal Pediatrics, and a giant in the world of pediatrics.  His own career embodies the best of academic medicine, and the best of how physicians can make a difference.

A hearty thanks go out to the AAMC on a fantastic meeting, with so many opportunities for reflection, for networking, and for the opportunity to improve the education of future physicians and leaders in health care.

#AAMC13: Saturday November 2, 2013 Reflections

It is currently the first night of my time in Philadelphia at the 2013 AAMC meeting.  I’ve only been here a little over 24 hours, but today has just been phenomenal for thinking about the future of medicine and medical education.  This blog is a few reflections from the day.  There were many other sessions that I attended, but these are some key elements from a few of the sessions that had a great impact on me.  The credit truly goes to the speakers whom I heard discuss these topics.

CME (Attribution: David Price)

The old way of thinking about CME is this: a “credit” required to justify “widgets” of learning.  This is shifting to a new CME/CPD model: aligning education with the gaps/needs of our communities.  In this new model, we can study why things work or don’t work.  For example: Does it work?  Can it work in real life?  How/why does it work?  Does it work better/cheaper?   What I think the challenge will be is finding the linkage to determine how the education is created, disseminated and implemented across health care systems.

Teaching Costs of Care/Value in Health Care (Attribution: Chris Moriates, Vineet Arora, Neel Shah)

The ABIM Foundation created a wonderful program as part of the Choosing Wisely Campaign which was a competition for programs/schools to present educational innovations to teach this important topic.  The criteria for this necessitated that the innovations be FINER: Feasible, Interesting, Novel, Ethical and Relevant.  Ultimately, interventions needed to address “COST”: Culture, Oversight, Systems Change, and Training.  3 speakers from different institutions highlighted their innovations, which demonstrated a variety of techniques to tackle this critical component of health care. My take home is that the health care providers have an obligation to our patients and society to tackle the issues of health care costs stemming from the unsustainable strain that these costs are putting on society.  This program showcases the fact that medicine as a field, under the leadership of the ABIM Foundation, is not pointing fingers at others (insurance companies politicians, or lawyers, for example), but rather is looking introspectively at how can we make a difference in addressing the cost issue.  The issue is real, but we are no longer burying our heads in the sand.

The Future of Medicine and the Need for More Residency Training Positions

I had the fortune of having dinner with our Associate Dean for Medical Student Affairs and 3 medical students from the IU School of Medicine.  We all reflected on the day, and what we all can take from the conference so far.  One big theme from that discussion is that advocacy is alive and well in the current generation that is going through school and training now.  Advocacy can take many forms, such as helping the disenfranchised, educating patients and families about the importance of vaccines, and/or even lobbying Congress to secure more positions for residency training.  The future of health care needs more physicians: medical schools have responded by increasing enrollment (and adding new schools), but the “bottleneck” is truly at the GME level.  In order to alleviate this, the number of residency positions need to increase.  This is not just a way to help students secure a residency position, but is the ultimate path towards addressing societal need for more health care providers.

Thank you, AAMC, for a wonderful first day of learning, camaraderie, discussion and interaction.  I look forward to the next few days as well!