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39th Annual Spring Conference
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Thursday, April 27
8:15-9:30 am
"The Hero's Journey-Crossing the Digital Divide"
John Bachman, MD, Mayo Medical School
This presentation will discuss the disruptive changes that technology is causing to family medicine. The discussion will point out that the need for any innovation in technology requires four items: (1) improving access and satisfaction for patients, (2) improving quality of care, (3) decreasing health care costs, and (4) improving the happiness of the providers. John Bachman, MD, will discuss the need for teachers of family medicine to be aware of how going to a digital environment is essential in preparing doctors for the future and point to how to get started and stay on the right path. The presentation discusses the barriers, threats, and potential of an environment where there is no paper and information is on a screen. Technology is the tool. How we use it will determine our future as a specialty.
Dr Bachman is the Saunders Professor of Primary Care at the Mayo Foundation. He maintains a busy active practice while providing small-group sessions for practicing physicians throughout the country. His pragmatic approach has led many doctors and their groups to go digital successfully. His other activities include being president of the Homes that Help and Heal, a national organization that provides free or low-cost housing to families that have a loved one in a medical center, being a part of the High Performance Physician Institute, and staying in shape by swimming on a regular basis.
Friday, April 28
8:15-9:30 am
"The Challenging Face of Primary Care"
Barbara Starfield, MD, MPH, Johns Hopkins University & Medical Institutions
The contributions of primary care to improving overall health and equity in health, as well as to reducing health services costs, are well documented. The same cannot be said for other specialties, whose contributions are poorly understood. A major challenge to primary care is to achieve comprehensiveness in its delivery so that unnecessary and potentially harmful use of other specialty services can be avoided. There are major implications for the training of primary care physicians (primarily in the community) and the training of specialists (in hospitals) to prepare them for the different roles they will play in diagnosis and management and for their interaction in practice.
Barbara Starfield, MD, MPH, is University Distinguished Professor with appointments in the Department of Health Policy and Management and Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University Schools of Public Health and Medicine. She is also the director of the Johns Hopkins University Primary Care Policy Center. Dr Starfield’s overriding concerns are understanding the impact of health services on health, especially with regard to the relative contributions of primary care and specialty care on reducing inequities in health. Her focus is both on clinical care and on services to populations as well as the inter-relationships between the two.
She received her BA degree from Swarthmore College, her MD degree from the State University of New York, and her MPH degree from the Johns Hopkins University. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a member of the Institute of Medicine. She is the recipient of numerous national awards, including the first Pew Primary Care Research Award, the Distinguished Investigator Award of the Association for Health Services Research, the Wood Award for Lifetime Contribution to Primary Care Research, and the American Public Health Associations’s Martha May Eliot Award. Dr. Starfield was named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners (UK) in 2000 and received the Ambulatory Pediatric Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002; in 2004, she was awarded the Baxter International Foundation Prize for Health Services Research. Dr Starfield was the cofounder and first president of the International Society for Equity in Health, a scientific society devoted to contributing knowledge to assist in the furtherance of equity in the distribution of health.
Saturday, April 29
8:00-9:15 am
“Has the Family Medicine Scholar Ship Arrived”
Bernard Ewigman, MD, MSPH, University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), with a budget approaching $30 billion per year, has a new emphasis on identifying best practices in the diagnosis, prevention, or management of a disease; enhancing adoption of best practices; engaging participants and communities in research; using practice-based research networks as laboratories; and fostering the development of clinical and translational research as a distinct discipline. These emphases represent a major shift in funding opportunities for training researchers, developing clinically relevant scholarship, and conducting research in family medicine. The nature of the scholarship, the transdisciplinary approach, and the track record of family medicine align well with these priorities. Bernard Ewigman, MD, MSPH, will trace the development of scholarship in family medicine, describe the current state of scholarship, and argue that intellectual activities in family medicine could grow substantially in the next 20 years. The vision of engaging every family physician and family medicine faculty member in the translation, teaching, and generation of new knowledge appears to be more achievable now than ever before. The Family Medicine Scholar Ship has arrived.
Dr Ewigman completed his residency, a 2-year Robert Wood Johnson academic fellowship, and then began his faculty career, all at the University of Missouri-Columbia (MU) where he remained until moving to Chicago in 2002. He is currently professor and founding chair of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Chicago. At MU, Dr Ewigman served as director of research, the Academic Family Medicine Fellowship, the Center for Family Medicine Science. He also served as medical director of the Boone County Health Department and the Family Health Center, a practice that he and his wife started in 1992 for the medically underserved that still serves as a continuity training site for MU family medicine residents.
Past awards include the Pew Primary Care Research Award for the most outstanding primary care researcher in the US, the Chancellors Award for Creative Research for the best original research at MU, and Outstanding Young Physician of the Year in Missouri. He has served as principal investigator on 15 federal and foundation grants and contracts, as editor for several family medicine textbooks, journals, and electronic knowledge databases, and has served on numerous federal advisory groups at the NIH, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He led the development of and serves as the president and executive editor of the Family Physicians Inquiries Network (FPIN), a not for profit bi-national academic consortium of 22 universities and 78 family medicine residency programs whose 2,500 members are dedicated to using information technology to translate research evidence into practice at the point of patient care, teaching clinical scholarship, and generating original research from practice.
Sunday, April 30
10:00-11:30 am
“Of New Models and Friends”
Roland Goertz, MD, MBA, The Heart of Texas Community Health Center, Waco, Texas
Why do you do things the way you do them? Do you regularly venture outside the confines of your operational world to see if models from other industries might help improve yours? Can you tell others, with a straight face, that you are continually working on options to make things better? Do you have the right people in the right roles? Do you promote and help create a culture of innovation and acceptable risk taking?
Management experts advise challenging our organizations regularly with the above questions and warn that if we do not, we will eventually be in trouble, financially, operationally, or both. So, if you end up in trouble, do you know which friends (the organization’s or yours) might help you? Remember, “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Most educational and not-for-profit organizations do good work, but are often not well known in their communities by those who can actually help them. Do you cultivate ongoing community knowledge of your organization’s benefits to the community? If you do not, do you know who does this very important role for your organization?
This presentation will review lessons learned from one organization that survived near bankruptcy by converting itself into a new operational model and by creating more knowledge in its community about what it did and why it needed ongoing community support. The results of the changes and community knowledge creation were so substantial that it even surprised the change leaders!
Roland Goertz, MD, MBA, is chief executive officer of the three foundations that oversee all operations of the Waco Family Medicine Center, a center providing over 120,000 patient visits per year and operating a 36-resident family medicine training program. He is an associate clinical professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.
Dr Goertz has been a country doctor, residency director, department chair, and foundation CEO in his 20-year medical career. He currently serves on the American Academy of Family Physicians’ Commission on Governmental Advocacy, The Residency Assistance Program Panel of Consultants, and as a family medicine representative to the Association of American Medical Colleges Council of Academic Societies. He is a delegate to the AAFP representing the Texas Academy of Family Physicians. He has given many presentations covering multiple medical management issues to both health care and public audiences.