Project Aims to Transform FPs' Training

A new project to restructure and renew family medicine residency training has received more than $1.7 million in pledges this spring from the American Board of Family Medicine Foundation and Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors.

TransforMED, an AAFP practice redesign initiative, will oversee the six-year project, which is called Preparing the Personal Physician for Practice, or P to the fourth power, P4, according to a mid-May notice to residency directors.

The approach to family medicine training "has changed little since it was originally devised 40 years ago," said Larry Green, M.D., co-chair of the P4 steering committee and a member of the ABFM Board of Directors. "Yet the world of medicine and patient care continue to evolve rapidly. Most of the drugs we use now didn't exist 40 years ago. Many procedures that are commonplace now weren't yet invented. Outpatient imaging tools such as ultrasound didn't exist. New training approaches are essential to ensure that family physicians are prepared to embrace new models of care."

In 2004, the Future of Family Medicine report called for a new model of care in which each American would have a personal medical home. TransforMED recently launched a national demonstration project that will test the that proposed model of care in 36 family medicine practices.

"P4 is a logical extension of the national demonstration project already under way," said Terry McGeeney, M.D., TransforMED's president and CEO. "The two will operate collaboratively and in parallel, allowing key insights from the national demonstration project to seed new training strategies and approaches."

The ABFM Foundation pledged $1.5 million to P4 in April, and the AFMRD committed $230,000 in early May. "This initial funding is the springboard for the TransforMED P4 project," said McGeeney. "We look forward to engaging others in the effort to prepare primary care physicians for tomorrow's practice."

The 12-member P4 steering committee will meet July 20-21 in Chicago "to put more meat on the skeleton" of ideas for developing P4, said Samuel Jones, M.D., co-chair of the P4 steering committee, president-elect of the AFMRD and director of the Virginia Commonwealth University/Fairfax Family Medicine Residency Program in Fairfax. "How we create the model of care described in the Future of Family Medicine report is what P4 is all about. Our future family physicians need to start practicing in that model in residency."

Jones said P4 leaders are counting on residency programs to churn out a barrage of creative ideas for the specialty's future. "We want everyone in the discipline to be thinking, 'If I could start over, what would my training look like within my institution and my community?' We want to put as few restraints as possible on the thought generation," said Jones.

As for a timeline, Green suggested the residencies may be launching their experiments by June 2007, and the steering committee will outline steps for the project's evolution soon. For more information on the project, contact Jay Fetter, P4 project manager, at jtfetter@tmed.biz.