New Grants Available From ABIM Foundation to Advance Stewardship Competencies in Medical Education and Training

March 24, 2015 - PHILADELPHIA - Today the ABIM Foundation announced a grant program to foster innovations and new approaches to integrating stewardship competencies and better decision making in medical education and training.

The "Putting Stewardship into Medical Education and Training" grant program will award up to six grants of $25,000 each to clinical training programs in medicine/surgery, nursing and other allied health professions. The goal of the grants is to expand existing training program initiatives or launch new ones designed to reduce the overuse of certain tests or procedures.

In addition to their projects, grantees will also participate in an existing learning network created by Costs of Care and the ABIM Foundation to share ideas and collaborate in the development of learning strategies in medical education and training. The new grant program complements the recent Teaching Value and Choosing Wisely Challenge, which recognizes innovative efforts by medical students, residents and faculty to promote stewardship. The full RFP is available on the ABIM Foundation's website. Grant applications are due by May 18, 2015.

"More than ever, patients and health systems need clinicians who consciously focus on delivering high-value care. The Physician Charter calls on physicians to be responsible for the stewardship of health care resources, yet clinical training programs don't consistently teach them how to fulfill this responsibility when they enter practice," said Daniel Wolfson, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the ABIM Foundation. "To address this critical gap, we'll need creative ideas-particularly ones that can be readily integrated into the learning experience and spread to other organizations. We hope to catalyze the creation of strategies that clinical faculty and learners can use to develop and reinforce these skills through both formal and informal curricula."

For more than a decade, the ABIM Foundation has developed and implemented programs that advance medical professionalism to improve health care. Recent initiatives have focused on physicians' professional responsibility to use medical resources wisely and avoid unnecessary care, including the Choosing Wisely® campaign. Through this effort, the ABIM Foundation has convened more than 70 specialty societies that have collectively published over 350 recommendations of tests, treatments and procedures they say are overused, with a goal of encouraging physician, clinician and patient conversations about avoiding unneeded care.

About the ABIM Foundation
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 abimfoundation.org, read the Medical Professionalism Blog, connect with us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.