ABIM Foundation Announces New Grant to American College of Physicians to Improve Care Transitions

Philadelphia, PA, The ABIM Foundation has awarded a grant of $60,000 to the American College of Physicians (ACP) to support their efforts in developing tools for primary care practices to improve care transitions for patients moving from the hospital to the home. The project, IM-PACT, is part of ACP's Medical Home Builder, and will explore both what practices can do to improve their capacity on the receiving end of transitions from hospital to community-based care, as well as what they can do to help mitigate unnecessary hospitalizations and to improve coordination of care during an inpatient stay.

"Improving the interaction of inpatient care teams with primary care teams is critical in order to decrease morbidity and mortality rates, enhance patient experiences and to decrease preventable hospital readmissions," said J. Fred Ralston, Jr., MD, FACP, president of the American College of Physicians. "This initiative fits well with the College's commitment to explore ways to deliver high-value, cost conscious care."

This initiative will look across a number of established, evidence-based transitions programs to identify common elements that relate to primary care and explore how primary care providers can optimize their practices in response. A web-based module should be available for physicians by the end of the year.

"This grant to the American College of Physicians embodies the principles of patient welfare, patient autonomy and social justice outlined in the Physician Charter on medical professionalism," said Christine K. Cassel, MD, President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and ABIM Foundation. "Effective care transitions are vital to the health of the patient and sustainability in the health care system."

Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium: A Physician Charter, authored in 2002 in partnership with the American College of Physicians Foundation and European Federation of Internal Medicine highlights the responsibility of physicians to improve the quality of care they deliver and for just distribution of finite resources. The Charter has been endorsed by more than 130 organizations and cited in 956 articles and 412 books around the world.

The IM-PACT module seeks to address the many issues and concerns raised in prior work supported by the ABIM Foundation through the Stepping Up to the Plate initiative which developed a consensus paper that established the principles, standards and measures for care transitions upon which the new ACP module will be built.

The mission of the ABIM Foundation is to advance medical professionalism to improve the health care system. We achieve this by collaborating with physicians and physician leaders, medical trainees, health care delivery systems, payers, policy makers, consumer organizations and patients to foster a shared understanding of professionalism and how they can adopt the tenets of professionalism in practice. To learn more about the ABIM Foundation, visit www.abimfoundation.org, connect with us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

The American College of Physicians is the largest medical specialty organization and the second-largest physician group in the United States. ACP members include 130,000 internal medicine physicians (internists), related subspecialists, and medical students. Internists specialize in the prevention, detection, and treatment of illness in adults. Follow ACP on Twitter and Facebook.