Primary Care Training Enhancement

The purpose of this collaborative grant, led by NEOMED’s Dept. of Family and Community Medicine, is to improve the primary care workforce by enhancing inter-professional training for primary care clinicians, teachers and researchers, with specific attention to underserved populations, across the care continuum. Through this group, we are hoping to achieve the quadruple aim of improved healthcare quality (specifically for underserved populations), lowered costs, improved patient and family experience, and improved health care provider experience. We will achieve this goal by implementing a formal curriculum for medical students, faculty, and residents to meet four objectives:

1. Transform healthcare systems by providing the knowledge and skills necessary for improving systems of care, building multidisciplinary teams, increasing quality of skills, and improving the work-life of healthcare providers;

2. Incorporate population health to gain knowledge of strategies and interventions across the continuum of care to improve health at the lowest cost;

3. Reduce disparities by increasing understanding of the causes of disparities and solutions to them, including social, economic, political, cultural, legal and ethical theories related to health disparities; and

4. Develop research expertise to develop collaborative projects to improve access, quality of care, and cost-effectiveness.

This collaborative program engages family medicine, general internal medicine, pediatric and behavioral health departments from one medical school, nine residency programs, and two federally qualified health centers. Metro Health Services of Cleveland (MHS) will provide training and mentoring in adapting their HRSA-funded PCTE program. We will provide interdisciplinary training to faculty physicians from each residency program and FQHC, with other care team members from each site including NPs, PAs and behavioral health specialists. The goal of this train the trainer model is for each of the training sites to have a minimum of three care team faculty complete the program, with one master trainer in each of the following three areas: transforming health systems, population health management, and reducing health disparities. The faculty experts at their site will champion the work, and train residents and other faculty. Working with the Associate Dean of Curriculum, faculty in Internal and Family Medicine will integrate this curriculum through four years of medical school. We will conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the recruitment, education, and retention efforts. We will collect data from assessments of the training, institutionalization of the curricula and connection to existing networks that are conducting community-based research on underserved populations. The evaluation will take place via web-based survey software and through focus groups. Stakeholders will complete pre and post surveys of their training on the first and last day of the curriculum and will participate in focus groups and interviews outside of structured class times for the other scheduled assessments. 

This project is/was supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under grant number T0BHP30006 (Primary Care Training and Enhancement). The total award amount is $2.5 million over 5 years, from July 1, 2016 – June 20, 2021. This information or content and conclusions are those of the author and should not be construed as the official position or policy of, nor should any endorsements be inferred by HRSA, HHS or the U.S. Government.