Physician Mental Health: My Personal Journey and Professional Plea.

Longitudinal surveys of adults in the United States have shown that approximately 1 in 5 individuals experienced a mental illness in the prior year, with an increase in the observed prevalence over the last decade. Studies of physicians, including medical students, residents, and fellows, have shown that they also experience mental disorders, with some research (e.g., on depression) showing prevalence rates higher than those in the general population. Tragically, physicians also have higher suicide rates than the general population. In this commentary, the author discusses his own challenges with mental disorders beginning in early childhood. He shares how earlier trauma led to the emergence of symptoms that nearly caused him to withdraw from medical school during his first year, and he describes how support from a faculty member helped him receive psychiatric treatment that allowed him to successfully negotiate that serious crisis and experience a long, productive career. The author underscores how the idealized image of the physician as care giver rather than care receiver that many bring to their medical career, as well as the stigma associated with mental disorders, may prevent physicians from seeking care. He uses the narrative of his personal journey to make a plea to colleagues to share their own stories of mental illness and successful treatment, arguing that this is key to ultimately destigmatizing these issues for the profession of medicine.

Navigating Tumultuous Change in the Medical Profession: The Coalition for Physician Accountability.

Collaboration among the national organizations responsible for self-regulation in medicine in the United States is critical, as achieving the quadruple aim of enhancing the patient experience and improving population health while lowering costs and improving the work life of clinicians and staff is becoming more challenging. The leaders of the national organizations responsible for accreditation, assessment, licensure, and certification recognize this and have come together as the Coalition for Physician Accountability. The coalition, which meets twice per year, was created in 2011 as a discursive space for group discussion and action related to advancing health care, promoting professional accountability, and improving the education, training, and assessment of physicians. The coalition offers a useful avenue for members to seek common ground and develop constructive, thoughtful solutions to common challenges. Its members have endorsed consensus statements about current topics relevant to health care regulation, advanced innovation in medical school curricula, encouraged a plan for single graduate medical education accreditation for physicians holding MD and DO degrees, supported interprofessional education, championed opioid epidemic mitigation strategies, and supported initiatives responsive to physician workforce shortages, including the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, an expedited pathway by which eligible physicians may be licensed to practice in multiple jurisdictions.

What Should Guide Health Policy? A Perspective Beyond Politics.

As the U.S. electorate has become increasingly polarized, these divisions are poised to shape legislative and regulatory work in the years ahead. For those whose focus is on the public goods of health care for all, the advancement of science through rigorous research, and the contribution of higher education to the continual improvement of the nation's workforce, there is profound uncertainty about the future. There are several pressing questions facing the nation and academic medicine, including the future of affordable, accessible insurance; acceptance of scientific evidence; sustainable learning and teaching methodologies; and the well-being and preparation of the nation's health workforce to care for an increasingly diverse nation. For those in academic medicine and policy making alike, the authors propose a framework, grounded in scientific evidence and guided by clinical ethics, for designing and evaluating health policy solutions for these and other pressing questions.

Health Care Transformation: The Role of Academic Health Centers and Their Psychologists.

The health care system of the United States has been in a period of dramatic transformation since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and the rate of change is accelerating. Historically, health care delivery was focused on the efforts of independent individual providers related to single patients, but the future will require interprofessional teamwork to achieve successful transformation. Academic health centers must identify nimble leaders who can harness the expertise of every team member to succeed in yielding the triple aim-better care for individuals, better health for populations, and lower overall cost. To create this change, there are several critical success factors for academic health center leaders, including creating a culture of collaboration, becoming "multipliers," embracing innovation, adhering to core professional ethics, and working to promote resilience. Given their extensive training and predisposition to these skills, psychologists are well-positioned to serve as leaders in today's academic health systems.

Taking Risk: Early Results From Teaching Hospitals' Participation in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Initiative.

The authors describe observations from the 27 teaching hospitals constituting the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) cohort in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) initiative. CMMI introduced BPCI in August 2011 and selected the first set of participants in January 2013. BPCI participants enter into Medicare payment arrangements for episodes of care for which they take financial risk. The first round of participants entered risk agreements on October 1, 2013 and January 1, 2014. In April 2014, CMMI selected additional participants who started taking financial risk in 2015. Selected episodes include congestive heart failure (CHF), major joint replacement (MJR), and cardiac valve surgery. The AAMC cohort of participating hospitals selected clinical conditions on the basis of patient volume, opportunity to impact savings and quality, organizational and clinical team readiness, and prior process improvement experience. Early financial results suggest that focused attention to postacute care utilization and outcomes, rapid changes in care processes, program pricing rules, and team composition drove savings and losses. The first cohort of participants generated savings in MJR, CHF, and cardiac valve episodes; losses were experienced in stroke, percutaneous coronary intervention, and spine surgery. Although about one-quarter of U.S. teaching hospitals are participating in BPCI, the proliferation of existing and new payment models, as well as the 2015 announcement to increasingly pay providers according to value, mandates close scrutiny of program outcomes. The authors conclude by proposing additional opportunities for research related to alternative payment models.

Graduate Medical Education: Its Role in Achieving a True Medical Education Continuum.

Nearly half a century ago, Lowell T. Coggeshall recommended, through what has come to be known as the Coggeshall Report, that physician education-medical school (or undergraduate medical education [UME]), residency training (or graduate medical education [GME]), and continuing medical education (CME)-be "planned and provided as a continuum." While the dream of a true continuum remains unfulfilled, recent innovations focused on defining and assessing meaningful outcomes at last offer the anchor for the creation of a seamless, flexible, and ongoing pathway for the preparation of physicians. Recent innovations, including a widely accepted competency framework and entrustable professional activities (EPAs), provide key tools for creating a continuum. The competency framework is being leveraged in UME, GME, and CME and is serving as the foundation for the continuum. Learners and those who assess them are increasingly relying on observable behaviors (e.g., EPAs) to determine progress. The GME community in the United States and Canada has played-and continues to play-a leading role in the creation of these tools and a true medical education continuum. Despite some systemic challenges to implementation (e.g., premedical learner formation, time-in-step requirements), the GME community is already operationalizing these tools as a basis for other innovations that are improving transitions across the continuum (e.g., competency-based progression of residents). The medical education community's greatest responsibility in the years ahead will be to build on these efforts in GME-joining together to learn from one another and develop a continuum that serves the public and the profession.

Interprofessionalism: Educating to meet patient needs.

Interprofessional teams in health care are showing promise in achieving the triple aim-providing better care for the individual patient, reducing costs, and improving population health. To complement current changes in health care delivery in the United States, there is a growing consensus among health professions educators that students should be trained in interprofessional models prior to entering clinical practice. Current interprofessional education (IPE) efforts in anatomy education are producing positive results in enhancing professional respect, collaboration, and teamwork among health professions students. In spite of existing structural and cultural barriers to IPE, health professions educators must continue to lead and grow IPE efforts as a critical component to improving the health of our nation.

Transforming educational accountability in medical ethics and humanities education toward professionalism.

Effectively developing professionalism requires a programmatic view on how medical ethics and humanities should be incorporated into an educational continuum that begins in premedical studies, stretches across medical school and residency, and is sustained throughout one's practice. The Project to Rebalance and Integrate Medical Education National Conference on Medical Ethics and Humanities in Medical Education (May 2012) invited representatives from the three major medical education and accreditation organizations to engage with an expert panel of nationally known medical educators in ethics, history, literature, and the visual arts. This article, based on the views of these representatives and their respondents, offers a future-tense account of how professionalism can be incorporated into medical education.The themes that are emphasized herein include the need to respond to four issues. The first theme highlights how ethics and humanities can provide a response to the dissonance that occurs in current health care delivery. The second theme focuses on how to facilitate preprofessional readiness for applicants through reform of the medical school admission process. The third theme emphasizes the importance of integrating ethics and humanities into the medical school administrative structure. The fourth theme underscores how outcomes-based assessment should reflect developmental milestones for professional attributes and conduct. The participants emphasized that ethics and humanities-based knowledge, skills, and conduct that promote professionalism should be taught with accountability, flexibility, and the premise that all these traits are essential to the formation of a modern professional physician.

Selecting tomorrow's physicians: the key to the future health care workforce.

Recent U.S. health care reform efforts have focused on three main goals: improving health care for individuals, improving population health, and lowering costs. Physicians, who traditionally have practiced with considerable autonomy, will be required to become members of the team-based patient care models necessary to achieve these goals. In this perspective, the authors assert that medical school admissions, the selection of the future physician workforce, is a key component of health care reform. They review the historical context for medical school admission processes, which have placed a premium on grades and standardized test scores, and examine how admission practices are undergoing fundamental changes in order to select physicians with both the academic and interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies necessary to operate in the health care system of the future. The authors describe how new techniques, such as holistic review and multiple mini-interviews, are contributing to the shift toward competency-based medical education. Innovations underway at the Association of American Medical Colleges to transform medical school admissions also are explored. The authors conclude by arguing that although the admission process has great potential to transform the future health care workforce, major overhauls of the health care payment and delivery systems must be achieved alongside innovations in health professions education to truly transform the U.S. health care system.

Making equity a value in value-based health care.

Equity in health and health care in America continues to be a goal unmet. Certain demographic groups in the United States-including racial and ethnic minorities and individuals with lower socioeconomic status-have poorer health outcomes across a wide array of diseases, and have higher all-cause mortality. Yet despite growing understanding of how social-, structural-, and individual-level factors maintain and create inequities, solutions to reduce or eliminate them have been elusive. In this article, the authors envision how disparities-related provisions in the Affordable Care Act and other recent legislation could be linked with new value-based health care requirements and payment models to create incentives for narrowing health care disparities and move the nation toward equity.Specifically, the authors explore how recent legislative actions regarding payment reform, health information technology, community health needs assessments, and expanding health equity research could be woven together to build an evidence base for solutions to health care inequities. Although policy interventions at the clinical and payer levels alone will not eliminate disparities, given the significant role the social determinants of health play in the etiology and maintenance of inequity, such policies can allow the health care system to better identify and leverage community assets; provide high-quality, more equitable care; and demonstrate that equity is a value in health.

The challenge of promoting professionalism through medical ethics and humanities education.

Given recent emphasis on professionalism training in medical schools by accrediting organizations, medical ethics and humanities educators need to develop a comprehensive understanding of this emphasis. To achieve this, the Project to Rebalance and Integrate Medical Education (PRIME) II Workshop (May 2011) enlisted representatives of the three major accreditation organizations to join with a national expert panel of medical educators in ethics, history, literature, and the visual arts. PRIME II faculty engaged in a dialogue on the future of professionalism in medical education. The authors present three overarching themes that resulted from the PRIME II discussions: transformation, question everything, and unity of vision and purpose.The first theme highlights that education toward professionalism requires transformational change, whereby medical ethics and humanities educators would make explicit the centrality of professionalism to the formation of physicians. The second theme emphasizes that the flourishing of professionalism must be based on first addressing the dysfunctional aspects of the current system of health care delivery and financing that undermine the goals of medical education. The third theme focuses on how ethics and humanities educators must have unity of vision and purpose in order to collaborate and identify how their disciplines advance professionalism. These themes should help shape discussions of the future of medical ethics and humanities teaching.The authors argue that improvement of the ethics and humanities-based knowledge, skills, and conduct that fosters professionalism should enhance patient care and be evaluated for its distinctive contributions to educational processes aimed at producing this outcome.