Students driving practice change
Students nationally are “the most important” drivers of the increasing focus on SDHs in medical education, according to Dr. Fair. “They are demanding experiences to learn about the entire patient. We know that only 20% of a patient’s health is dependent on their health care. Our students are demanding education about the other 80%.”
More and more, communities are identifying needs and “students will then come up with initiatives to meet those needs,” Dr. Fair said.
Others interviewed for this story predicted this trend will only intensify, since not-for-profit hospitals are required under the Affordable Care Act regulations to assess community health needs every few years and to intervene accordingly.
Education on health care systems is also advancing. Penn State University, for instance, utilized a million-dollar grant from the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative to design and implement a 4-year curriculum on the health system sciences that started in 2014. The curriculum includes an immersive experience in patient navigation.
“Students were taught to be patient navigators, and they were assigned within the clinical context to work on issues like, why are [patients] having trouble getting their medications?” said Susan E. Skochelak, MD, MPH, who leads the 6-year-old Accelerating Change initiative as vice president for medical education at the AMA.
From the start, she noted, students at Penn State are encouraged to question inequities, social and structural barriers to health, and faults in the health care system. “The message given at their white coat ceremony is ‘Welcome to medicine. Now that you’re here, you’re a member of the health care team, and we want you to speak up if you think there are things that need to be addressed. We want you to tell us when the system is working and not working,’ ” said Dr Skochelak, who previously served as the senior associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, where she had been a tenured professor of family medicine.
Tomorrow’s physician partners
Approximately 80% of medical school graduates who participated in the AAMC’s 2018 survey of graduates said they had received significant training on health disparities—up from 71% in 2014.
“There’s a huge amount [of innovation] happening, but on the flip side, there’s not really a set of accepted tools and practices, and certainly no robust evaluation [of the training],” said Philip M. Alberti, PhD, senior director for health equity research and policy at the American Association of Medical Colleges. A recently published review (J Gen Intern Med. 2019;34[5]:720-30) shows growing interest in the teaching of SDHs in undergraduate medical education but variable content, strategies, and instructional practices.
Dr. Philip M. Alberti
Health care systems and practicing physicians are still very much feeling their way with SDHs. Screening tools are being developed and tested, and academic medical centers are trying to determine their roles in addressing issues such as transportation and housing – and what funding and structural levers can be pulled to fulfill these roles. “As we learn more about [these issues], it will become clearer what the right baseline set of competencies might be for all physicians,” Dr. Alberti noted.
In the meantime, some basic expectations for medical education are taking root officially. The National Board of Medical Examiners, with whom the AMA has partnered in its Accelerating Change initiative, has included questions in the United States Medical Licensing Examination on population health and SDHs, and plans to add more exam content on these topics and on health systems science, said Dr. Skochelak.
And through its site visit program (the Clinical Learning Environment Review program), the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has “made it pretty clear that there’s an expectation that residents and fellows are learning about the health system’s approach to identifying and addressing health care disparities – and that they’re given opportunities to develop quality improvement initiatives that target those disparities,” Dr. Alberti said.
In hopes of achieving consistency across medical specialties and in national accreditation and board certifications exams, the American Association of Medical Colleges is developing its first set of competencies in quality improvement and patient safety, with health equity being one of these competencies’ domains .
The competencies are tiered for medical school graduates, residency graduates, and faculty physicians who are 3-5 years post residency. At this point in time, said Dr. Alberti, the consensus among medical educators has been that physicians “need to be able to understand and consider [social, economic, and structural] contexts when they’re seeing patients, when they’re developing care plans, when they’re talking with caregivers, and when they’re looking at their own quality data.”
Elisabeth Poorman, MD, MPH, an internist at UW Medicine in Kent, Washington, said she worries that the passion of medical students for SDHs will too often be crushed, especially during residency and with immersion in the productivity-focused health care system. Studies show a drop in mental wellness and empathy and a rise in cynicism as training advances, said Dr. Poorman, who also writes about health care and issues of equity and serves on the editorial advisory board of Internal Medicine News.
With similar concerns, the AMA has recently launched a “Reimagining Residency” initiative that aims to improve transitions from medical school to residency and the wellness of residents and faculty, and expand educational content relating to SDHs.
Dr. Fair is optimistic that new physicians’ knowledge of SDHs will permeate medical practices.
“Physicians who are out practicing are going to be working with our graduates, and they’re going to be asking in [job] interviews, do you have flexible hours for patients? What community partnerships do you have? Are there other professionals on staff to help us address social determinants of health? What data [relating to SDHs] are you collecting?” she said.
Correction, 8/26/2019: An earlier version of this story misstated the title of Aletha Maybank, MD. Dr. Maybank's correct title is the first chief health equity officer of the American Medical Association.