In this edition:
Register Now for the 2019 CFAS Spring Meeting - Early Bird Special Expires Feb. 28
Resources from Learn Serve Lead 2018: The AAMC Annual Meeting
AAMC Joins Consortium on Addressing Sexual Harassment in STEMM
Update on the AAMC’s Holistic Review Project
CFAS Rep Profiles: Susan Keen, MD, and Mark Jordan, MD
Society Profile: Association of Departments of Family Medicine (ADFM)
AAMC’s Convey Global Disclosure System Available to CFAS Societies
Medical Education Poster at LSL
Register Now for the 2019 CFAS Spring Meeting – Early Bird Special Expires Feb. 28
Registration for the 2019 CFAS Spring Meeting is open, with an early bird registration fee of $1,200 that will remain in effect through Feb. 28. If you miss the early bird, which cannot be extended, the standard fee will be available up until the April 4-6 meeting in Atlanta.
We’re very excited about this year’s program, which is at once topical and responsive to feedback you’ve given us about the programming you want to experience at CFAS meetings. Sessions will include three topical plenaries, interactive workshops, and Ignite-style breakouts called “Spark” sessions. It also will include an AAMC leadership update, a business meeting, and our traditional open-mic knowledge sharing session.
Plenary topics include:
- Addressing Sexual Harassment in Academic Medicine
- Hot Topics in Bioethics and Health Policy
- Preparing Faculty for Changes in Medical Education
To build upon the plenary offerings, two of these plenary topics will have thematically related “Spark” sessions to explore the issues in more details – one on sexual harassment, and the other on medical education.
Workshops, a first for CFAS based on your feedback in past meeting evaluations, will include programming on community engagement, global health, unconscious bias, and science education.
Understanding the Conference Schedule:
- CFAS committees will meet in two cohorts on April 4 at 8:30 a.m. and 9:45 a.m. (Learn more about the committees.)
- CFAS new representative orientation will take place April 4 at 11 a.m.
- A session on how to be a better CFAS rep will take place April 4 at 12:30 p.m.
- The conference officially kicks off with the opening plenary on April 4 at 2 p.m.
- Conference closes April 6 at noon
We urge you to stay for the entire meeting, since sessions and themes are interconnected. You can review full session descriptions, speakers, and other details on the registration site, at http://www.cvent.com/d/hbqtlz.
Resources from Learn Serve Lead 2018: The AAMC Annual Meeting
Learn Serve Lead 2018: The AAMC Annual Meeting wrapped up last November and was attended by about 4,600 academic medicine leaders, clinicians, scientists, and educators, including more than 120 CFAS reps. Plenary topics included the surprising and inspiring science of success, insights into the current state and future direction of academic medicine, a keynote session on confronting gender bias by Anita Hill, JD, and a discussion about how four doctors learned to cultivate empathy and resilience from adverse life experiences.
CFAS reps once again made major contributions to the programming for the AAMC’s signature annual meeting, with a total of 9 concurrent breakout sessions originating from CFAS. Summary materials from the event are available.
AAMC Joins Consortium on Addressing Sexual Harassment in STEMM
Last November, the AAMC became one of the sponsoring organizations for the newly formed Societies Consortium on Sexual Harassment in STEMM to improve professional and ethical conduct, climate, and culture across academic communities. The consortium will convene disciplinary society thought leaders to develop strategies to operationalize and implement key recommendations from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s report, Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The Societies Consortium includes 53 inaugural member societies representing disciplines across STEMM and continues to welcome others. It was established by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and the American Geophysical Union (AGU), with EducationCounsel serving as the policy and law consultant for the initiative.
Focused on advancing full participation and excellence in STEMM and preventing and responding to sexual and gender harassment in STEMM environments, the Societies Consortium will provide impactful resources and guidance to address sexual harassment in the member societies’ own operations and more broadly within the fields they represent. Specifically, that guidance will include research- and evidence-based resources for societies that include findings and expertise from social and behavioral sciences. Initial work will focus on model policies and procedures for society honors and awards, and additional information and resources will be available in coming months.
An invitation to join the initiative with more information was sent to all CFAS society representatives and executive directors. That message included an overview of the Societies Consortium, and a Membership Form (M-Form) to sign and return to SocietiesConsortium@educationcounsel.com to initiate membership. Follow up communications were also sent to society leaders encouraging them to register for two informational webinars that provided more detail on how societies can engage with the consortium. David Acosta, MD, AAMC chief diversity and inclusion officer, will represent the AAMC as a member of the consortium leadership planning group.
Update on the AAMC’s Holistic Review Project
In 2008, the AAMC began promoting holistic review in admissions and, in collaboration with a constituent-led advisory committee, designed and developed mission-centered, admissions-related tools and resources for medical schools hoping to attract and sustain the diverse backgrounds and perspectives crucial for the achievement of institutional goals. This work evolved into a strategic framework consisting of a definition and four core principles that has been overwhelmingly adopted by the undergraduate medical education admissions community.
After holistic admissions has become a viable, popular approach in undergraduate admissions, the AAMC’s holistic review team is looking for CFAS reps to participate and contribute their expertise as it explores the applicability of holistic review in other selection processes—namely, residency selection and faculty selection. At this point, the team is simply curious to learn about successful approaches and whether some residency programs have successfully partnered with their UME colleagues to implement holistic review, or if there are tools or best practices that the GME community might find useful. If you are interested in partnering with the team around these efforts, contact cfas@aamc.org.
Key resources from the initiative include the “Roadmap Series,” a collection of three publications that discuss the policy and legal aspects of holistic review, the implementation of holistic review into undergraduate admissions, and the evaluation of holistic review in admissions. Learn more.
CFAS Rep Profiles: Susan Keen, MD, and Mark Jordan, MD
Susan Keen, MD, Junior School Rep; Clerkship Director, Clinical Associate Professor, Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. Note: Dr. Keen will be among the Spark session presenters on medical education at the upcoming CFAS Spring Meeting in Atlanta.
CFAS: Are there any experiences or opportunities you have had through your membership in CFAS that have specifically benefitted you as an educator?
Dr. Keen: I always come away from CFAS meetings with many tools to help me as an educator. Specifically we have been working on wellness and resilience at our institution and I had the opportunity to attend the session led by Tait Shanafelt, MD, at Learn Serve Lead 2018: The AAMC Annual Meeting. He discussed the role of a chief wellness officer within his institution and ways that such a position might get funding. I have mentioned this to ECU and we are working on implementing it. I also attended sessions on what other institutions are doing to teach students about the social determinants of health. I am the director of our Service-Learning Distinction Track for the Brody School of Medicine and I came away with several ideas about how to enhance our curriculum to better serve the surrounding communities.
CFAS: What are some recent developments in family medicine that would be interesting to other CFAS reps?
Dr. Keen: The American Board of Family Medicine is piloting an alternative to the 10-year board recertification process. The new Family Medicine Longitudinal Assessment pilot will be available for diplomates in the 2019 Family Medicine Board Renewal Cycle. We are excited to finally have the opportunity to work with the ABFM (American Board of Family Medicine) to develop a more longitudinal recertification process that will help its members stay current on an ongoing basis instead of a high-stakes exam once every 10 years.
CFAS: What advice do you have for women entering academic medicine?
Dr. Keen: It’s important for women entering academic medicine to connect with other colleagues both at their home institution as well as others to support each other and advance their careers through working in collaboration on educational or clinical research projects. CFAS has been particularly helpful to me in this area. I have made some wonderful connections to faculty in a lot of different medical schools and in a number of different disciplines. It is also very important for women entering academic medicine to have a 5 year goal in mind. This will help them choose the right opportunities to devote time to. Academic medicine is full of research, service, teaching, and patient care activities and women must carefully choose what percentage of time to devote to each, and which ones may not be worth pursuing towards their 5 year goal. This will help prevent young faculty from becoming overcommitted in the early years of their career.
CFAS: Are there any recent accomplishments at the Brody School of Medicine that would be interesting to other CFAS reps?
Dr. Keen: East Carolina University (ECU) has recently partnered with University of North Carolina (UNC) – Pembroke to allow faculty from both institutions to work together on research and educational initiatives in the field of public health. UNC Pembroke is located near the South Carolina border in a very underserved area of North Carolina. This new partnership will help both universities to further their commitment to the people of Eastern North Carolina. We are working together to more fully understand what aspects of the social determinants of health are impacting eastern North Carolina the most so we can begin to implement strategies to assist in those areas. ECU is establishing a new School of Rural Public Health which will combine the departments of public health, health education and promotion, biostatistics, health services information and management, and the Center for Health Disparities to better lead a coordinated effort to improve the health of the people of eastern North Carolina by having a more concentrated and focused effort working together across the many disciplines.
CFAS: What do you like to do in your free time?
Dr. Keen: My family and I enjoy sports, hiking, and exploring the outdoors, especially state parks, the beach, and the mountains.
Mark Jordan, MD, Senior Society Rep, Society of Academic Urologists; Clinical Professor and Residency Program Director, University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. Note: Dr. Jordan is a member of the CFAS Program Committee, playing an important role is developing content for the 2019 CFAS Spring Meeting in Atlanta.
CFAS: What, in your opinion, is a benefit to your society of membership in CFAS?
Dr. Jordan: It’s very helpful for societies to be aware of CFAS as a national forum, within the AAMC, for mutually important issues such as medical education, training, qualifications, and the involvement of subspecialty societies in medical education. That way, societies can inform the AAMC’s initiatives and efforts on issues that affect them, and then the AAMC can think about how to provide further value to its society members through CFAS. In my case, raising awareness of surgical subspecialties’ needs is an important benefit of membership in CFAS.
As a rep for the Society of Academic Urologists, it’s been very valuable for me to become familiar with some of the other specialties involved in medical education who I otherwise wouldn’t have encountered at other meetings. I’ve gotten to know a lot of nonsurgical and surgical reps from other societies. Networking with other society reps and discovering commonalities is great. Membership in CFAS allows smaller societies to draw insights from different medical disciplines and create understanding around the issues they face and the work they do with a broader audience. CFAS has helped me understand some of the broader issues in medical education, the economics of medicine, and faculty development highlights that are of concern to other specialties.
CFAS: How has involvement in CFAS benefitted you in your role as a residency program director?
Dr. Jordan: Membership in CFAS has helped me get involved with other types of educators and specialties, which has given me ideas of how to apply different teaching methods within my program. I would like to see CFAS discuss the challenges of being a program director considering some of the new ACGME requirements. It would also be nice for program directors in CFAS to have more discussions around duty hour modifications, milestones, and resident surveys. It would be great to have a program directors’ forum or a meeting session on the challenges of being a program director from various perspectives.
CFAS: What are some new developments in the field of urology that would be interesting to CFAS reps and how could trends that may be occurring in your field translate to other specialties?
Dr. Jordan: Robotics is becoming more prevalent in surgery, especially in urologic oncology. There are changes happening in the ways we evaluate residents in terms of their technical skills and we do a lot with simulations. We have also used Angela Duckworth’s grit scale to evaluate grit in our current residents, as well as applicants for our residency program. [Angela Duckworth, PhD, was a plenary speaker at Learn Serve Lead 2018: The AAMC Annual Meeting.]
We are also examining the use of telemedicine for some patients in urology. Personalized medicine is very applicable in urology. For example, we do genetic screening for certain diseases specific to urologic oncology, in addition to familial genetics and molecular profiling in some cases, and all of this has the potential to translate to other specialties.
CFAS: What are some recent accomplishments from UC Irvine School of Medicine that would be interesting to other CFAS reps?
Dr. Jordan: UC Irvine’s stated mission statement is “Discover, Teach, Heal.” There is an emphasis on innovation at UC Irvine in terms of medical education, integrative medicine, interdepartmental collaboration, flipped classrooms, and exposure to subspecialties. In the Department of Urology, we are very interested in providing early exposure to our specialty to medical students, which they traditionally have not encountered until the third or fourth year of medical school in other institutions. As such, we provide one full day every year dedicated to urology where second year medical students are exposed to didactic sessions and what it means to be a urologist. This is followed by a practical lab where the students practice with a surgical robot and laparoscopic trainer. This generates interest in urology as a specialty and has become very popular with our medical students. In our department, we pride ourselves as innovators in medical education, minimally invasive surgery, oncology, and men’s health, to name a few.
CFAS: What do you like to do in your free time?
Dr. Jordan: I try to go to the gym and I like playing piano and listening to classical music. I also like travel, sports and spending time with family. Raised in Canada, I naturally like ice hockey and I used to play, but now I mostly attend games as a fan.
Society Profile: Association of Departments of Family Medicine (ADFM)
The Association of Departments of Family Medicine (ADFM) represents departments of family medicine at medical schools through department chairs. A senior administrator in the department can also represent the department alongside the chair. ADFM specifically represents academic departments who are involved in the three traditional missions of patient care, research, and education. Currently, ADFM represents 151 departments. Individuals can join ADFM as associate members as long as those individuals are not in a direct supervisory position over the chair of an ADFM-member department.
ADFM has an annual winter meeting, which will take place in February of this year in Houston, Texas. Pre-conference work at the annual meeting includes leadership training for chairs, administrators, and senior leaders in departments. ADFM also facilitates discussion, development, and learning through its listservs and quarterly webinars. Its goal is to develop family medicine chairs and build a pipeline by bringing senior department leaders to its meetings. It has a new fellowship titled, “Leadership Education for Academic Development and Success,” which is geared toward people who are interested in becoming chairs or other senior leaders in academic positions.
In terms of advocacy, ADFM has a Strategic Directions Work Plan and works closely with other family medicine organizations through the Academic Family Medicine Advocacy Committee (AFMAC) and with other academic family medicine organizations (the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, the North American Primary Care Research Group, and the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors) as part of the Council of Academic Family Medicine (CAFM). CFAS and ADFM, including AFMAC and CAFM, have many common advocacy interest areas, including federal GME funding, workforce expansion, impacts or effects of medical school expansion on family medicine GME and workforce, Title VII funding, and federal funding for family medicine research. ADFM is also very interested in the underrepresentation of certain groups in medicine and it collaborates with the CAFM on leadership development with a specific focus on women and underrepresented minorities in academic medicine.
More recently, ADFM is moving into diversity and inclusion and health equity issues with a focus on how department leaders can advance those issues in their departments and then their institutions.
“The issue of how academic departments of family medicine are diversifying their leadership is very important because family medicine serves many safety net populations. Studies show that having diverse doctors is crucial to advancing the health of disadvantaged populations. Specifically, we need to bolster the number of women and minorities in department leadership. To that end, through a new ADFM Diversity, Inclusion and Heath Equity Taskforce, we’re evaluating how to circulate best practices on increasing diversity within our departments,” said Ardis Davis, executive director of ADFM. Davis also suggested that CFAS could connect ADFM to the AAMC’s Group on Diversity and Inclusion (GDI) so ADFM could circulate diversity best practices within its departments. ADFM values the linkages between CFAS and the AAMC’s Group on Diversity and Inclusion and encourages department chairs to reach out to their schools’ GDI representatives to contribute to ADFM’s diversity goals.
In addition to connecting ADFM to resources on diversity, CFAS provides a place where ADFM can plug into the broader medical education space, which is especially important today because medical education is becoming more interconnected and new medical schools don’t have the siloed departments of old. “When faculty members go to conferences, they tend to meet people who do what they do, but CFAS meetings offer opportunities to collaborate and talk to people in different roles and in different specialties,” said Jeannette South-Paul, MD, the CFAS rep for ADFM and the Andrew W. Mathieson UPMC Professor and Chair of the Department of Family Medicine at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (UPMC). To stay in lockstep with the new reality, ADFM has evolved its definition of a “Department of Family Medicine” to be inclusive of aligned entities that don’t necessarily have “family medicine” in their titles.
Another national issue facing family medicine departments is the rapidly growing number of clinical networks around academic health centers, which is a complex issue because a large number of clinical faculty in academic departments of family medicine are also employed by the surrounding networks, so the departments have to figure out what exactly their relationships are with those physicians. Family medicine departments also must ask themselves how they are acting as bridges to unite academic primary care in their geographic regions.
“Family medicine is a relatively new discipline to join academic medicine, so membership in CFAS is valuable to ADFM because CFAS can provide background and context for how we can navigate being a newer discipline in medical schools. Family medicine faculty members don’t just need peers, we need allies and you don’t find allies unless you get involved in a membership organization like the AAMC,” said Dr. South-Paul.
Dr. South-Paul described the unique contribution of family medicine to population health, noting that improving the health of populations requires expanding the primary care workforce. The largest discipline with people going into primary care is family medicine. The health of a population is tied to the number of clinicians that can provide generalist, first contact, and compassionate care. That’s why ADFM’s membership in CFAS is so important because it’s an anchor for ADFM in the AAMC, and being involved with the AAMC helps societies navigate and understand the reimbursement and financial issues that affect academic health centers, such as state and federal budget cuts.
ADFM has leveraged its membership in the AAMC to work with Scott Shipman, MD, director of clinical innovations at the AAMC, on issues that deal with the specialist-primary care interface. ADFM has also been a partner in the AAMC’s Project CORE: Coordinating Optimal Referral Experiences. Opportunities for specialist-primary care collaboration as a result of membership in CFAS has even reached down to the individual level: Dr. South-Paul recently collaborated with ophthalmologist Evan “Jake” Waxman, MD, PhD, a fellow CFAS rep at UPMC and the CFAS rep for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, to do retinal screenings for diabetic eye disease in her primary care settings. Dr. Waxman worked with UPMC’s health centers to secure industry collaboration that helped set up the doctors’ office screenings.
“In academic medicine, faculty are still evaluated based on what they do as individuals, but advancing population health is not a soloist enterprise. My goal is to find the right specialist for my patient and my role in CFAS helps me understand the needs and issues of my specialist colleagues so we can form more alliances and see how we can achieve our goal of population health together,” said Dr. South-Paul.
AAMC’s Convey Global Disclosure System Available to CFAS Societies
Recent news stories about undisclosed conflicts of interest have mentioned Convey®, a disclosure system provided by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), as a potential solution to the problem, most notably in a letter to the New York Times by the Editor in Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. Many academic health centers, societies, and journals are currently using or exploring the future use of Convey, including a CFAS member society, which is currently piloting Convey for its disclosures.
Convey is a web-based financial interest disclosure system built to provide greater ease in disclosing and reporting relationships between industry and health care providers. The system is a result of a multi-stakeholder effort following an Institute of Medicine directive to centralize and streamline disclosures across medical societies, scientific journals, research institutes, and continuing medical education providers.
Individuals that use Convey have secure access to their own repository of financial interests that they can use to make tailored disclosures to organizations that use Convey. Individuals do not pay to disclose through Convey, and the cost for societies to subscribe to Convey is a tiered, annual fee based on the number of individual disclosures collected. Access to the system includes setting up a unique disclosure process in Convey, live and email customer support, and access to all system upgrades and enhancements without any changes to the IT systems at your organization. The AAMC is offering an additional 10% discount to CFAS member societies that subscribe to Convey.
If your society is interested in learning more about Convey, contact Convey@aamc.org
Medical Education Poster at LSL
At this year’s AAMC annual meeting (LSL), the AAMC’s medical education cluster presented a poster outlining its current, ongoing, and upcoming initiatives; learning offerings; professional development opportunities; and points of contact for areas of interest including competency-based medical education, humanities and arts integration, quality improvement and patient safety, and interprofessional education. To see the poster, click here.
Have you recently been promoted? Do you have a paper coming out? Let us know about any recent professional accomplishments and we’ll feature them in the next edition of the CFAS Rep Update.
Looking for information about CFAS? Find what you need on our website, from the names of CFAS leaders, to updates on committee and working group initiatives, to upcoming offerings and meetings, and finally, current and previous editions of CFAS News.
Do you have ideas or suggestions for the newsletter? A recommendation for a CFAS rep or member society to profile? All of your ideas are welcome. Please send them to cfas@aamc.org.