The AAMC NEXT Grant provided funding to institutions to develop or enhance a learning opportunity for medical students, residents, and other interprofessional learners that seeks to improve community health and eliminate health disparities with community partners.
For more information, please email Katrice D. Cain, MA, director of patient and community partnership development.
2023-2025 Recipients
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Community Partner: Take Back the Bronx
Through a series of community conversations, this project brought together health care providers, medical students, patients, and Bronx community members to strengthen patient-provider communication, promote authentic partnerships, and advance equitable health care.
University of California, Riverside School of Medicine
Community Partner: Advocate for Nurturing Transition (ANT) Consulting
Project Description: Faculty, medical students, and community members co-developed a community-based curriculum designed to strengthen patient self-advocacy. Through facilitated learning sessions, participants identified their health goals, developed and narrated their health story, and practiced communicating effectively with their health care providers.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Community Partner: Birth Sisters Doula
Project Description: In partnership with a birthing doula, medical residents developed digital stories and a facilitator guide that promotes maternity care tailored to each patient. This project encourages reflection on patient experiences, while strengthening resident well-being and clinical practice.
Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine
Community Partners: Eliminating Racism and Creating/Celebrating Equity (ERACCE) and Integrated Services of Kalamazoo (ISK)
Project Description: This project redesigned a service-learning curriculum to integrate systems-thinking, advocacy, and community engagement. Learners partnered with community organizations to better understand the social drivers of health and develop skills to advance health equity.
Yale School of Medicine
Community Partner: Women Against Mass Incarceration
Project Description: This project integrated the expertise of individuals with lived experience of incarceration into an interdisciplinary curriculum, a clinical care pathway, and a Patient Bill of Rights to preserve dignity, privacy, and autonomy for patients under correctional custody.
Previous Recipients
2020-2021
- George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. The medical school expanded its COVID-19 testing and support services in partnership with Bread for the City, a community-based nonprofit that operates a federally qualified health center in Northwest Washington, D.C. Medical students and residents further developed and managed DC COVID Connect, an open-access, up-to-date, peer-reviewed online information resource, and participated in training and volunteer activities to increase access to low-barrier COVID-19 testing in the district and address other health care and social service access barriers.
- University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. This project was a collaboration between the Miller School of Medicine, the School of Law Center for Ethics and Public Service, Grove Rights and Community Equity Inc., and Coconut Grove Ministerial Alliance Inc. to train learners to identify and develop data-driven solutions and policies that address the long-term impact of COVID-19 on the mental, financial, and physical health of residents in the West Grove community of Miami.
- University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center. The Health Sciences Center adapted and piloted the preexisting Tools for Community Empowerment and Social Change community-based participatory research curriculum to a COVID-19 context, engaging medical students and family and community medicine residents. Learners participated in an experiential learning opportunity that addressed COVID-19 inequities and access to care for people experiencing homelessness through a partnership with the Corona Crushers, a multisector group with members from academia, government, health care, and the community.
- University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine. Medical students, master of social work students, and resident physicians at the school of medicine, a Hispanic-serving Institution, partnered with El Milagro Clinic and the Hope Family Health Center to develop a guide to culturally informed public health messaging and to execute ¡Si se puede! — an interdisciplinary public health education campaign to address COVID-19 disparities, racism in policies, procedures and practices, and mistrust of health systems in South Texas.
- Wayne State University School of Medicine. Healing Between the Lines sought to enhance the Health Equity and Justice in Medicine (HEJiM) longitudinal curriculum that trains Wayne State University School of Medicine and Detroit Medical Center residents on social determinants of health, advocacy, and cultural sensitivity. The program’s subcurriculum expanded the HEJiM to include medical students and educate learners along the medical education continuum about the historical intersection of racism in all its forms and health by exploring and untangling the impact of redlining on the health outcomes of Detroit Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities.
2019-2021
- Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. The Trojan Trainer patient navigator program invites medical and physician assistant students to collaborate with Keck Street Medicine, University of Southern California health system leadership, and community partners to address medical and psychosocial needs by bringing care directly to patients experiencing homelessness. The program centers patients by establishing them as the trainers, recognizing their critical role as educators in medical training.
- Northwell Health. The Engaging in Health Advocacy through Neighborhood Collaboratives and Education (ENHANCE) community health track provides internal medicine, pediatric, and family medicine residents and nurse practitioner students with the opportunity to develop interprofessional community-based projects that assessed the impact of the social determinants of health on primary care outcomes.
- University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine. The Working With Interpreters as a Team in Health Care (WITH Care) simulation curriculum sought to improve the population health leadership skills of medical students and trainees through the integration of a validated interprofessional collaborative practice curriculum into the establishment of a new immigrant-refugee clinic.
- University of South Carolina School of Medicine - Greenville. ROOT CAUSE: Advancing Community Health and Active Citizenship is a monthly health and public services fair that aims to address the root causes of disease by increasing access to health care and promoting healthy lifestyle choices while simultaneously affecting students’ and residents’ perceptions of empathy and burnout.
- Weill Cornell Medicine. The Weill Cornell Medicine Wellness Qlinic is a student-run, free mental health clinic training medical students, residents, and psychologists to treat LGBTQ+ individuals and address mental health disparities seen in this population. The Wellness Qlinic program aims to improve the LGBTQ+ community’s access to culturally informed mental health care and provide academic opportunities for students and trainees to learn and study LGBTQ+-informed mental health.
The 2019 and 2020 cycles of the AAMC NEXT Grant were supported by Cooperative Agreement Number 5 NU36OE000007 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.