People in the News -- March

A number of AAFP members received various honors and awards recently.

Anthony Costa, MD., of Stow, Ohio, has been appointed the new associate dean of community partnerships for the college of medicine at the Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy, or NEOUCOM, in Rootstown.

According to a Feb 28 NEOUCOM news release, Costa will work to foster community partnerships for NEOUCOM with health systems, universities, communities and other clinical partners in his new position. Other duties will include establishing and monitoring benchmarks to gauge NEOUCOM's impact on community health and coordinating "education for service" activities in Akron, Canton and Youngstown.

In addition, Costa, who has served as professor and chair of the NEOUCOM Department of Family Medicine since 2005, will take on the additional role of chair of the soon-to-be merged family medicine and behavioral and community health sciences departments at NEOUCOM. He, along with family physician and current behavioral and community health sciences department chair Sharon Hull, M.D., M.P.H., of Rootstown, will continue as professors in the combined department of family and community medicine, which becomes official on April 11.

The Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative has chosen former AAFP President Ted Epperly, M.D., of Boise, Idaho, as one of four co-chairs of its newly created Center for Accountable Care.

In his new role, Epperly will focus on identifying and making recommendations about regulations and polices to advance the success of accountable care organizations, or ACOs, with a strong patient-centered medical home, or PCMH, foundation. He also will help identify and share best practices involved in establishing PCMH-centered ACOs, while working to educate stakeholders about the center's policy recommendations.

A member of the AAFP since 1980, Epperly is currently program director and CEO of the Family Medicine Residency of Idaho in Boise. He is also a clinical professor of family and community medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, or RWJF, has named former AAFP EVP Robert Graham, M.D., of Cincinnati, to be the new national program director (2-page PDF; About PDFs) for its Aligning Forces for Quality, or AF4Q, program. AF4Q represents the cornerstone of RWJF's $300 million initiative designed to improve the quality and equality of health care nationwide.

Graham also will hold an appointment as a research professor of health policy at George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, which serves as the national program office for the AF4Q program.

Graham currently is chair of the board of the Alliance for Health Reform and a member of the Institute of Medicine. He also is a professor and the Robert and Myfanwy Smith Endowed Chair in the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine Department of Family Medicine. In 2010, he was appointed project director for Cincinnati's AF4Q effort, overseeing all aspects of the program in the Cincinnati tri-state area.

Graham received his medical degree from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Kansas City, and served as the first administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration, as well as director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Center for Practice and Technology Assessment.

Michael LeFevre, M.D., M.S.P.H., of Columbia, Mo., has been named co-vice chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, or USPSTF. According to a March 14 news release from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which provides administrative and technical support to the USPSTF, LeFevre is the Future of Family Medicine professor and associate chair in the department of family and community medicine at the University of Missouri School of Medicine in Columbia. He also serves as the chief medical information officer for University of Missouri Health Care and is a former member of the AAFP Commission on Clinical Policies and Research.

Internist Albert L. Siu, M.D., M.S.P.H., who is the Ellen and Howard Katz professor and chairman at Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine in New York, was named LeFevre's co-vice chair.

Virginia Moyer, M.D., M.P.H., professor of pediatrics and head of academic general pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and chief of the academic medicine service at Texas Children's Hospital, will serve as the new USPSTF chair, replacing outgoing chair Ned Calonge, M.D., M.P.H., a family physician and president and CEO of the Denver-based Colorado Trust.

Thomas Schwenk, M.D., of Ann Arbor, Mich., has been named vice president of the University of Nevada, Reno, Division of Health Sciences and dean of the University of Nevada School of Medicine, which includes facilities in Reno and Las Vegas. He will join the university in July.

Schwenk's career has included rural clinical practice, extensive publication, teaching, visiting professorships and administrative experience.

According to a Feb. 23 press release from the Nevada medical school, Schwenk currently is professor and chair of the department of family medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. He is a fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine and has served as a reviewer and editor for several medical journals, including JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association.

A member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, Schwenk earned his medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor and completed a family medicine residency at the University of Utah Affiliated Hospitals in Salt Lake City.

Nine AAFP student members were honored during the 2011 AMA Foundation Excellence in Medicine Awards dinner last month as recipients of AMA Leadership Awards. The awards are presented each year in association with the Pfizer Medical Humanities Initiative to recognize recipients' strong leadership skills in advocacy, community service and/or education.

The Academy honorees and their academic institutions are

Betty Chung, M.A. -- University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey School of Osteopathic Medicine, Newark
Joshua Goldman -- Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine, Lubbock
Harb Harb -- University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A Carver College of Medicine, Iowa City
Matthew Imm -- Ohio State University College of Medicine, Columbus
Emery Lin -- Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago
Jason Reminick -- University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, N.Y.
Misty Richards, M.S. -- Albany Medical College, Albany, N.Y.
Stephen Rivoli, M.P.H., M.A., C.P.H.Q. -- Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, New York
Jason Thuener -- Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton, Ohio