Nationwide Children’s Hospital and The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center have been selected to pilot a national initiative to enhance primary care training in the departments of Family Medicine, Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. Physicians will receive comprehensive training on how to more effectively teach residents how to focus care around the needs of the patient, using the patient-centered medical home model.
The Primary Care Faculty Development Initiative (PCFDI), funded by the Health Services Resource Administration, is one of the first national faculty development projects of its kind bringing together family medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics in a pilot program to improve graduate medical education. It enables faculty teams to work together to train primary care residents to practice safely and effectively in a rapidly evolving health care system.
“We recognize that we have major gaps between the need to train our residents to provide an effective patient-centered medical home model and the required knowledge and the ability to teach this new way of practicing medicine among our faculty,” said John D Mahan, MD, program director for the Nationwide Children’s Hospital and The Ohio State University Pediatric Residency Program. “We are excited to have been selected to lead the process of innovation to deliver better graduate physicians and better primary care for our patient-families. The patient-centered medical home model allows us to center on their needs, when they need it.”
The curriculum for the initiative will focus on six key components: leadership, change management, teamwork, population management, clinical microsystems and competency assessment. These components all connect directly to patient-centered care from the perspective of a primary care residency and are critical skill areas that have been identified as urgent priorities by policy-makers and faculty within the academic communities of the three primary care disciplines.
“The programs at Nationwide Children’s and Wexner Medical Center will focus on developing effective online faculty education and implementing teaching methods including direct observation of trainees to provide necessary training and coaching, and measuring practical outcomes that will define the success of these efforts for the patients and families,” said Mahan. “Each patient-family has a personal physician who leads a team of individuals to provide comprehensive safe and high-quality care that is coordinated and integrated throughout the system with the aid of an effective enterprise wide Health Electronic Record. This allows us to continue the process of implementing these features more effectively so we can graduate new physicians able to provide this care to patients in their primary care offices.”
The participating faculty has recently begun working together to implement change in their training clinics and will receive ongoing updating and coaching to assist them in the process.
“When seeking recognition as a National Committee for Quality Assurance patient centered medical home, it can be tempting to get caught up with checking off boxes to meet requirements. Some of the more junior primary care faculty leaders working on our interdepartmental team have challenged us to dig deeper and champion the underlying spirit of being truly patient centered in the care we and our trainees are providing at all of our clinic sites,” said David Wininger, MD, associate professor of Internal Medicine at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center.
Nationwide Children’s Hospital and The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center were collectively one of four institutions chosen from a pool of 48 institutions nationwide to pilot the PCFDI. Other institutions piloting the program include Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, the University of Minnesota and the University of Nebraska.
Nine clinician-educators were selected to participate in the program, including John D. Mahan, MD, Mary Kay Kuzma, MD, Alex Rakowsky, MD, Melissa Meyer, MD, David Wininger, MD, Nazhat Taj-Schaal, MD, Andrew Schreiner, MD, Jared Moore, MD, W. Fred Miser, MD, Donald Mack, MD, and John McConaghy, MD.
The Primary Care Faculty Development Initiative (PCFDI) pilot program is being conducted by Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) pursuant to contract HHSH250201200023C with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration.