In this edition:
CFAS Society Summit
AAMC Leadership Forum on Gender Equity
2019 CFAS Spring Meeting
CFAS Tweet Chats
Register Now: Learn Serve Lead 2019: The AAMC Annual Meeting
Advocacy Update
CFAS Rep Profiles: Valerie Stone, MD, MPH, and Serina Neumann, PhD
CFAS Society Profile: The Association of Professors of Gynecology and Obstetrics (APGO)
AAMC Salary Equity Project
CFAS Society Summit
On June 3, CFAS held its inaugural Society Summit in a daylong event at the AAMC’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. The summit convened executives and representatives of AAMC-member societies along with AAMC and CFAS leaders to create and reinforce a stronger connection between the AAMC and its member societies. About 40 society representatives and executive directors representing 29 CFAS member societies attended the summit.
The summit provided society executives with a better understanding of the work of CFAS and the AAMC through detailed reports on AAMC advocacy and mission work, including updates from Scientific Affairs, Health Care Affairs, Medical Education, Academic Affairs, Diversity Policy and Programs, the AAMC data and services teams, and CFAS volunteer leadership.
Society leaders shared details about their own efforts that aligned with, complemented, or otherwise worked in concert with the AAMC and CFAS, and proposed new opportunities for deeper collaboration around mutually important issues in research, education, patient care, and federal policy. Time for networking and open discussion was provided throughout the day, including an opportunity for society executives to engage in an open mic, CFAS meeting-style “Knowledge Sharing Session,” and participants gave very positive feedback about the summit. Summary materials are available for download, along with several individual presentations.
AAMC Leadership Forum on Gender Equity
The AAMC’s 2019 Leadership Forum took place June 18–19 at the AAMC’s headquarters in Washington and centered on the topic of gender harassment and gender equity in academic medicine. Attendees included 120 people from across various AAMC groups and constituencies. CFAS Chair Scott D. Gitlin, MD, and Chair-elect Gabriela Popescu, PhD, represented the AAMC Board of Directors, and several CFAS reps were in attendance, including CFAS Immediate Past Chair Vincent D. Pellegrini, MD, Lumy Sawaki Adams, MD, PhD, Laura Shaffer, PhD, and CFAS ad board members Carolyn Meltzer, MD, and J. David Warren, PhD. Also in attendance was Caren Stalburg, MD, representing the AAMC's Group on Educational Affairs (GEA). Joseph E. Kerschner, MD, chair-elect of the AAMC Board of Directors, and provost and executive vice president and dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin, delivered the opening remarks. Presentations featured updates on what the AAMC is doing to address gender harassment and equity, as well as conversations on organizational changes in accountability, “allyship”, culture change, and bystander intervention.
2019 CFAS Spring Meeting
This year’s CFAS spring meeting was held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 4 – 6 and received the most positive feedback of any CFAS spring meeting so far. Among the most popular highlights were the Spark presentations on sexual harassment and medical education, which featured both moving personal stories and the latest best practices and insights from national experts on both topics. The meeting also offered opportunities for networking and wellness activities and the first CFAS tweet chats, which were runaway successes with 110 contributors and 336 total tweets using #CFASChat.
Thank you to everyone who worked so hard to make it such a memorable meeting! Summary materials are available on the CFAS homepage. With your meeting confirmation number, you can also log into the meeting's Cvent webpage to view speaker presentations, which can be found under the "Participants List and Presentations" tab.
CFAS Tweet Chats
Following up on the success of the first CFAS tweet chats at the 2019 CFAS Spring Meeting, CFAS recently hosted another tweet chat on Tuesday, June 25 focused on well-being in academic medicine. The chat once again received a lot of engagement and generated a lengthy, robust conversation. A report on the impact of the chat and a full transcript of the conversation will be made available on the CFAS website in the coming weeks, and more tweet chats are being planned on various topics throughout the year. If you are interested in having a chat on a specific topic, or if you would like to learn more about how the chats work and how to participate, email Alex Bolt at abolt@aamc.org.
Register Now: Learn Serve Lead 2019: The AAMC Annual Meeting
Mark your calendars for Learn Serve Lead 2019: The AAMC Annual Meeting, taking place November 8–12 in Phoenix, Arizona. Registration is open and plenary speakers will include the following:
- Bryan Stevenson, JD, a best-selling author, lawyer, and social justice advocate who is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and a professor at New York University School of Law. He is the author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.
- Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer and a former executive editor and executive vice president at Random House, who is also a contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor to Time magazine, and a former editor-in-chief of Newsweek.
- Amy Edmondson, PhD, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, and the author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.
There will be more information about CFAS-related programming in the coming weeks.
Advocacy Update
At every CFAS spring meeting, AAMC leadership provides a presentation on the latest legislative and policy developments affecting academic medicine. At the 2019 CFAS Spring Meeting, AAMC Chief Public Policy Officer Karen Fisher, JD, offered a comprehensive update, touching on issues around the strong, bipartisan support for NIH funding and uptake on AAMC-supported bills addressing the physician shortage. Karen also commented on the FY19 budget, noting that funding for VA research and ARHQ was increased, HRSA workforce funding was preserved, $4 billion in Medicaid DSH cuts were delayed, and the AAMC’s lawsuit challenging CMS’ site-neutral payment policy is moving through the courts. Karen’s full Public Policy Presentation is available for download on the CFAS homepage under the “Spotlight” header.
To join the AAMC in advocating for medical schools and teaching hospitals, faculty are always encouraged to join AAMC Action, the AAMC’s digital grassroots advocacy community. Faculty members engaging in advocacy at the local, state, or federal level are also advised to work closely with their institution’s government relations professionals, as there may be state laws governing how faculty can interact with lawmakers.
CFAS Rep Profiles: Valerie Stone, MD, MPH, and Serina Neumann, PhD
Valerie Stone, MD, MPH
Senior CFAS Society Rep, American College of Physicians; Vice Chair for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Charles S. Davidson Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
CFAS: You were very involved in the CFAS spring meeting – what is valuable to you about membership in CFAS and what value does CFAS bring that you think other faculty members should know about?
Dr. Stone: I’ve found CFAS to be very valuable because membership allows me to connect to faculty members in disciplines and fields other than my own. I have the opportunity to represent my own society, the American College of Physicians, but also hear from representatives in other fields, which broadens my perspective. Even within my specialty of internal medicine, there are subspecialists who I would normally never interact with, but membership in CFAS introduces me to them. So CFAS is unique because it provides networking opportunities across the entire field of academic medicine.
CFAS: Talk about your experience in HIV/AIDS care.
Dr. Stone: The first time I cared for a patient with HIV/AIDS was in 1983, and it’s been an amazing journey to see how we’ve improved care for these individuals, going from no medications to wonderful treatments that can keep the disease under control and enable patients to live a normal life. The current antiretroviral regimens are durable, don’t cause a lot of side effects, and we don’t need to switch patients between different regimens like we used to.
In terms of putting an end to the HIV epidemic, there’s a lot of great strategies being developed around increased testing and starting medications immediately, on the day of HIV diagnosis. This is the focus of the CDC’s “Getting to 0” initiative. This initiative, whose goal is to end the epidemic is being led by cities, one of which is Boston. These cities have care sites that see patients and start them on medications on the same day as their diagnosis.
I’m currently working on the second edition of my book HIV/AIDS in U.S. Communities of Color, which will be published sometime in 2020, and this is one of the exciting developments that we will highlight in the book.
CFAS: What are some of the most valuable lessons you have learned as a medical educator?
Dr. Stone: Inspiring our learners is vital to helping them learn. It’s helpful to communicate why a particular topic is important, why it matters to the patient, and why it matters for the learner’s career. Something that’s been effective for me is thinking out loud in the clinic and explaining to learners how I analyze a case, what went into my diagnostic thinking process, how I ruled things out, and how I got to the treatment plan. Teaching learners how to “think like a doctor” and by developing effective clinical decision-making skills is even more important than teaching them facts. We must convey the process of analysis and decision making because many of the facts we know today will be outdated and replaced within ten years.
Role modeling, professionalism, and compassion are also very important to learners. We should also do all we can to promote health equity to learners by teaching them to ask whether each patient’s care has been influenced by their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or their ability to pay.
We also need to be on the lookout for systems factors that may have resulted in inappropriate care, such as a patient being managed at the hospital when they could have been managed at home. It’s important to talk to learners about the challenges and complexity of structural, system, and social determinants of health factors that contribute to illness in patients.
CFAS: What are some recent accomplishments or new initiatives at Harvard Medical School that would be interesting to CFAS reps?
Dr. Stone: I am excited about the many new initiatives focused on diversity and inclusion at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and at the HMS affiliated academic medical centers. I was honored to be asked by the Dean to serve on the special Task Force that he assembled on Diversity and Inclusion. This group developed a new Diversity Statement for the medical school and new policies and metrics to be tracked regarding diversity at all levels (medical students, graduate students, residents, fellows, faculty). I very am pleased that I will have an opportunity to contribute further in this important space through my new leadership role.
CFAS: What do you like to do for fun?
Dr. Stone: I enjoy relaxing with family and friends. In addition, I love walking my dog around Jamaica Pond, going to beaches here in Massachusetts especially Martha’s Vineyard and Provincetown. I also enjoy eating at the many amazing restaurants we have here in Boston.
Dr. Stone led a session at the 2019 CFAS Spring Meeting titled “Leadership Curriculum II: Creating a Sense of Urgency and Influencing Your Chair, Dean, and CEO.” She was recently elected president of a subset of the Association of Chiefs and Leaders of General Internal Medicine and was installed in this role at the annual meeting of the Society of General Internal Medicine in May. She is also transitioning from her role as Chair of the Department of Medicine at Mount Auburn Hospital to a new role at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Vice Chair for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion of the Department of Medicine in late June.
Serina Neumann, PhD
Chief Wellness Officer, EVMS; Professor, EVMS Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; Senior CFAS School Rep
CFAS: Tell us about your research.
Dr. Neumann: Since I’ve been in graduate school, my research has focused on how emotional and cognitive chronic stress influences our psycho-neurophysiology and what physical interventions might offset that stress and the negative impacts it has on the body. Some interventions I’ve used include mindfulness, meditation and relaxation exercises, bio- and neuro-feedback, and walking programs for reducing falls risk, and enhancing cardiovascular health. My role as EVMS’ chief wellness officer aligns nicely with the research I do. My previous research has helped me to develop the wellness program for EVMS, except now I’m looking at how to reduce workplace stress and enhance well-being at an institutional level.
CFAS: What issues are top of mind for professors of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in academic health centers?
Dr. Neumann: One important consideration for us is that there is a vast disconnect between what we say we value in academic medicine and reimbursement. Although not unique to psychiatry and clinical health psychology, the increasing demands on clinical productivity is in conflict with other academic responsibilities: teaching, advising, mentoring and research. We are pressured to educate more trainees and provide care for more patients, while keeping the quality of the care as high as possible and serving the community with equitable care. We must be innovative in how we leverage our time to meet these competing goals, which is another reason why integrated care and team-based care including psychologists and behavioral health needs to be more prominent as it is more effective and efficient. Also, now more than ever, we’re striving to recruit future health care providers and trainees in a way that promotes diversity and inclusion, which will help provide better, more equitable health care.
CFAS: What was your impression of the 2019 CFAS Spring Meeting and how could CFAS continue to improve future meetings?
Dr. Neumann: The ambience of this meeting was teeming with curiosity, energy, and a sense of compassion and respect for each other. That really encouraged the active engagement and learning that I saw at the meeting. It’s very important that CFAS retains that atmosphere at future meetings. The meeting featured inspiring stories, followed by presentations and time to reflect on alternative perceptions, followed by conversation around how to get to solutions we could take back to our institutions and societies. That format was very valuable and should also be retained in future meetings. Updates on the latest federal policy developments, advocacy strategies, and research trends were also valuable.
CFAS: What are some recent accomplishments or initiatives at EVMS that would be interesting to other CFAS reps?
Dr. Neumann: The new wellness program I’m developing for EVMS would be interesting. We’re currently finishing the first year of our strategic wellness plan. With my committee of institutional stakeholders, I’ve implemented some yearly assessments to understand how people are doing and how they are using the programming we’ve created. This year, we’ve rolled out a wellness series for professional development, regular assessments of wellness, new, more flexible faculty leave policies, and we’re working on monthly wellness challenges. We are currently doing fitness and hydration challenges.
We’ve also been implementing a wellness curriculum for residents and students, which is focused on nourishing their professional identity development and formation. We’re trying to help them reflect and be more aware of their emotional processing, the context of the situation, the team dynamic, their responses and decisions and how they affect caring for patients. We’re discussing the creation of educational videos that help uncover biases in our thought process and affect our decision making in health care. We’re working on piloting gender bias education videos to be coupled with small group discussions on solutions.
My collaboration with the CFAS Faculty Resilience group has been instrumental in informing and shaping some of the wellness initiates we’ll be piloting. Also, Anca Dobrian, PhD, my EVMS CFAS rep counterpart, and I have partnered with Elza Mylona, PhD MBA, [the CFAS Administrative Board’s liaison to the AAMC’s Group on Faculty Affairs (GFA)] to work on the CFAS Mission Alignment and Value of Faculty Educators Committee using the EVMS promotion criteria revised recently. Both workgroups have helped create some momentum and ideas for us here at EVMS.
CFAS: What do you like to do for fun in your free time?
Dr. Neumann: I love to spend time with my daughter and watch her play competitive soccer. I’m an outdoorsy person and love to garden and get outside as much as possible. I also have two dogs who I spend a lot of time with. I love to travel and discover different cultures; taste different wines; spend time with family and friends; and practice yoga, meditation, and mindful walking.
CFAS Society Profile: The Association of Professors of Gynecology and Obstetrics (APGO)
The Association of Professors of Gynecology and Obstetrics (APGO) represents 225 allopathic and osteopathic ob-gyn departments in the U.S. and Canada. Individual members include over 1,300 physician educators, deans, department chairs, residency program directors, clerkship directors and faculty who train medical students and residents in both university and community-based settings. APGO’s primary focus is on the creation of useful materials to improve undergraduate medical education and the association realizes that goal by providing a rich network of resources to its membership.
Among the most popular resources are the Medical Student Educational Objectives, now in its 10th edition, and the APGO Undergraduate Web-Based Interactive Self-Evaluation (uWISE). The widely-utilized Medical Student Educational Objectives are available in pdf form and through the interactive Curriculum Builder, which aids in customized curriculum development. Used by virtually all medical school ob-gyn departments nationwide, uWISE is designed to help medical students acquire basic knowledge in obstetrics and gynecology regardless of their future medical specialty choice. Departments can subscribe for students, or students – including international students – can subscribe directly. APGO’s residency program directory is another very popular and widely used offering, along with several scholars programs that have proven to be transformative to participants’ careers.
In addition to a host of members-only benefits, APGO members get preferential pricing for the association’s annual Martin L. Stone, MD Faculty Development Seminar, held each January, and the CREOG & APGO Annual Meeting, held every February or March. The association also distributes an annual clerkship directors’ survey used to help shape curriculum for clerkship directors’ schools, inform development of APGO products and identify areas of support that clerkship directors might need. APGO provides several educational resources for clerkship directors and medical students and supports the Academic Scholars and Leaders Program and Surgical Education Scholars Program, both with small groups of selected participants lasting more than a year (15-months and 18-months respectively), which help to train the next generation of teachers and leaders.
APGO provides its members with robust networking opportunities and members can apply for leadership roles on APGO committees and on its Board of Directors. In 2018, APGO’s Board of Directors approved the creation of a new Educational Research and Scholarship Committee in alignment with the association’s focus on improving the quantity and quality of ob-gyn research. APGO recently launched the RFP process for a grant from its Medical Education Endowment Fund to support a multi-site research project and, because of the association’s emphasis on networking, has created an alumni society for program graduates, former committee members, and former Board members.
“At our Faculty Development Seminar in Maui, I witnessed first-hand the decades-long friendships and collaborations formed during APGO scholars programs that have continued to this day. It’s a transformative experience for participants,” said Molly Georgakis, who is the new executive director of APGO as of October 2018. “We’re very excited that Molly joined us – she brings a lot of new energy,” said Nadine Katz, MD, a professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Women’s Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the APGO rep to CFAS.
The association also puts a premium on collaboration and inclusion, having incorporated osteopathic members before that requirement was mandated by the ACGME. APGO’s current and future goals include increasing membership, engaging new medical educators and preparing them for future leadership opportunities, exploring global health education opportunities, continuing to develop tools for use by community educators and creating solutions to issues around the transition from UME to GME.
Following an increase in news coverage on the topic of teaching pelvic exams to medical students, the APGO Board of Directors approved the formation of a task force to look into the topic and to make recommendations about APGO’s role in providing guidance and eliminating misconceptions. The association recently issued a statement on the topic, which is supported by the AAMC, ACOG, ACOOG, and AUGS. The task force is currently writing a paper on the issue.
APGO is always striving to raise the bar in terms of educational standards and recently released 30 new videos on vertical integration of basic sciences into the ob-gyn clerkship, with a companion teaching script for each.
Because APGO represents faculty and learners, it is in a unique position to advance educational standards in UME, in addition to GME. “I’ve been the APGO rep to CFAS since it was CAS [the Council of Academic Societies], and there is great synergy between the two groups. There are many potential opportunities for APGO to collaborate with CFAS in the future,” said Dr. Katz. “In particular, we have an opportunity to expand our work with CFAS because APGO is unique in focusing on both faculty development and learner education.” One specific area of potential collaboration is around the issue of wellness. APGO is beginning to address this in light of the rigorous schedule and long hours worked by doctors in ob-gyn while helping Ob-Gyn educators find professional fulfillment through teaching and mentoring.
AAMC Salary Equity Project
The AAMC is working on a Salary Equity Project to encourage medical schools to launch their own salary equity projects by providing them with new AAMC data, tools, and community promising practices to facilitate their success. The overall goals of the project are to understand the current state of medical school faculty compensation by gender and identify promising practices within the academic medicine community to help facilitate and advance salary equity studies at the local level. The project is making significant progress and is in the process of producing deliverables such as,
- Promising Practices for Understanding and Addressing Salary Equity at U.S. Medical Schools, which presents national trends in faculty compensation by gender from the AAMC Faculty Salary Survey, as well as a compilation of promising practices from 11 institutions with experience in this work;
- A toolkit of diverse resources to assist in developing local policies and practices to address salary equity including compensation data tables, study examples, compensation philosophy and dashboard samples;
- A Faculty Salary Equity Tool (FSET) (only available to deans and Principal Business Officers for dissemination at their institutions), which features a dynamic, excel-based report that examines national total compensation trends by gender, department rank, degree, and across private/public institutions over the past 5 years. The tool also includes an aggregated national data file for use in local studies.
Several CFAS reps who serve as department chairs were consulted for input throughout this project.
CFAS Reps in Action:
- Catherine Pipas, MD, MPH, was awarded the 2019 Society of Teachers of Family Medicine’s (STFM) Gold Humanism Award. Dr. Pipas is a CFAS Ad Board member, the senior society rep for the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Foundation, and a professor of community and family medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine.
- Arthur Derse, MD, JD, was interviewed in an AAMCNews article on how to manage a patient who refuses lifesaving treatment, and other complicated bioethics issues. Dr. Derse is also a CFAS Ad Board member, the senior rep for the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and director of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Have you recently been promoted? Do you have a paper coming out? Let us know about your recent professional accomplishments and we’ll feature them in the next edition of the CFAS Rep Update.
Post-Script:
The AAMC recently distributed a sign-on letter calling on congressional members to cosponsor “The Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act of 2019” (S. 348, H.R. 1763). The legislation would increase the number of residency positions eligible for Medicare DGME and IME support by 15,000 slots above the current caps in order to address the physician workforce shortage. Over 75 associations and specialty societies, including many CFAS-member societies, have signed onto the letter, and the legislation has over 78 cosponsors between the House and Senate bills.
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.
Previous Editions:
February 2019