Guiding principles are an important, if sometimes abstract, element of program coordination. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) evaluates graduate medical education programs by six core competencies: patient care; medical knowledge; practice-based learning and improvement; interpersonal and communication skills; professionalism and systems-based practice.

The School of Medicine Division of Graduate Medical Education (GME) and Continuing Medical Education (CME) hosted the Annual Educational Leadership Summit in November in order to better understand the ACGME core competencies. Judging from the overflow crowd of faculty members, program directors and program coordinators in attendance, exploring these principles is elemental to enhancing OHSU’s GME and CME programs.

Donald Girard, MD, Associate Dean for Graduate Medical Education, and Chuck Kilo, MD, Chief Medical Officer, gave an overview of the conference. “It’s going to take deep departmental changes to produce the type of physician we want to create,” said Dr. Kilo. The programmatic changes must be made rapidly because “the time for ‘slow’ in health care is over.”

The objectives of the summit included incorporating the core competencies in education by focusing on systems-based practice; enhancing leadership development to create champions in quality improvement; gaining insights from innovative approaches at OHSU and in the community; and identifying measurable outcomes that achieve these goals. Andrea Cedfeldt, MD, Assistant Dean, GME, said “shifting our culture and how it operates” will be essential to meeting these goals.

Participants in the Paths to Leadership program are already doing work on improving systems within the School of Medicine, including focusing on and disseminating information about quality initiatives at OHSU. Drs. Daniel Handel, Joseph Hardman and Timothy Smith spoke about their project creating a business case for implementing best practices in quality and patient safety across the clinical enterprise.

Drs. Patricia Carney and Patrice Eiff are co-investigators of a national project that will enroll 800 residents in a training program rooted in the concept of a primary care medical home – a patient-centered delivery model based on care provided by a team of clinicians. Now in its fourth year, the outcomes of this project will inform future GME training programs here and across the country.

Particulars:
•    Daniel Handel, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine
•    Joseph Hardman, MD, Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine
•    Timothy Smith, MD, MPH, FACS, Professor, Department of Otolaryngology, Head & Neck Surgery
•    Patricia Carney, PhD, MSN, Professor, Department of Family Medicine
•    Patrice Eiff, MD, Assistant Dean, Faculty Development and Professor, Department of Family Medicine

Pictured: (top) OHSU President Joe Robertson welcomes the audience to the Annual Educational Leadership Summit; (bottom) Dr. Kilo presents information on systems-based training to attendees