P4 Participants Promise Innovation, Creativity in Residency Education

Adding a fourth year to residency training. Immersing residents in the medical home concept. Redesigning curriculum to enhance expertise in health issues and the health information technology of the future. Those are among the elements included in proposals put forth by 14 family medicine residency programs that will test innovations in training tomorrow's family physicians.

The proposals will be implemented and evaluated during the next five years as part of the Preparing the Personal Physician for Practice -- also known as P to the fourth power, or P4 -- initiative.

The Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors and the American Board of Family Medicine, in conjunction with TransforMED -- AAFP's practice redesign initiative -- named the family medicine residency programs that will participate in P4 and described their proposals in a Feb. 15 announcement.

"While many family medicine residency programs are taking new and progressive approaches to physician training, the 14 residencies participating in the P4 initiative will highlight innovations taking place in residencies across the country," said Samuel Jones, M.D., president of the AFMRD and co-chair of the P4 steering committee, in the announcement.

P4 builds on the expertise of the family medicine educators who proposed the innovations that will be studied to a 12-member steering committee, according to Larry Green, M.D., co-chair of the P4 steering committee. The steering committee, working with TransforMED, will oversee the P4 project.

The initiative "relied on the imagination and judgment of family medicine residency directors and their staffs," Green said. "It is our hope that, by encouraging change by innovation as opposed to dictating change, the P4 initiative will give birth to a new and progressive way of training family physicians to be personal doctors."

Several innovations comprise the P4 projects. Among them are

"I think this project has the potential for demonstrating some truly new and creative ways of preparing family physicians for the future," said Perry Pugno, M.D., M.P.H., director of the AAFP Division of Medical Education. "What we're trying to do is help find more efficient and effective ways of preparing family physicians for the realities of the health care environment as it is today and what it is evolving toward in the future."
"P4 is a logical extension of the TransforMED national demonstration project currently under way," said Terry McGeeney, M.D., president and CEO of TransforMED. "The two initiatives will operate collaboratively and in parallel."

The evaluation component of the P4 project will be overseen by Patty Carney, Ph.D., and a team from Oregon Health & Science University.

A May kickoff event will mark the start of the initiative for the 14 programs, which will share their results on an ongoing basis during the next five years.