REBUILDING AFTER THE FLOOD: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE 2019 ADFM WINTER MEETING

In February, the Association of Departments of Family Medicine (ADFM) hosted another successful annual conference, this year in Houston, Texas. The theme of the meeting, “Rebuilding After the Flood: Designing Our Departments’ Move Toward Value Based Health Care,” was a nod to our meeting location as well as a concise summary of much of the conference content, which highlighted some of the tensions departments are facing in growing and changing to meet the needs of the current and future health care systems.

After a day of ever-popular preconference work-shops, including one for the department administrators in ADFM and one on leadership focused on conflict engagement, we kicked off the conference with a bit of internal reflection. Our incoming president, Steve Zweig, MD, MSPH, gave a presidential address reflecting on how we are not alone on our individual or collective journeys, calling attention to who supports us along the way. Following this, Kevin Grumbach, MD, ADFM President, hosted an “interview” with Julie Moretz, Assistant Vice President for Patient- and Family-Centered Care and Chief Experience Officer at Augusta University and ADFM’s public member of the Board of Directors, about her observations as an “out- sider” participating in ADFM over the last year—what we are doing well and how to better address our blind spots to meet the intent of our ADFM tagline, “Vision, Voice, Leadership.”

Julie’s story, observations about ADFM, and emphasis on how we can all try to make our organizations welcoming places for patients of all types set the stage perfectly for Denise Rodgers, MD, FAAFP, Vice Chancellor for Interprofessional Programs at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, who delivered the meeting’s first keynote presentation on the role of Family Medicine in eliminating health disparities by race. Her presentation resounded as an inspiring call to action and tied nicely into ADFM’s first “One Book, One ADFM” author conversation.

The idea behind “One Book, One ADFM” is to be a sort of all-organization book club—with a book chosen (and advertised ahead of the meeting) to relate to meeting content and to prompt “big picture” dialogue. This year, we chose a local author, Rachel Pearson, MD, who attended UTMB Galveston, and her book, No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine. The book describes Rachel’s experience of beginning to see inequities in the health care system through her medical education—themes highlighted in her author talk and the small group discussions around how to address health equity and mentor students who are seeing it for the first time.

One major issue in No Apparent Distress is how Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters exacerbate health inequity. To talk more about the impacts of natural disasters, we hosted a panel on Natural Disaster Preparedness and Risk Mitigation, moderated by Barbara Thompson, MD, chair at UTMB Galveston, and including David Persse, MD, the Emergency Services Director and Public Health Authority for the City of Houston, as well as Tara Scott, MD, the Program Director for the Sutter-Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency which was burned down in the California wildfires in the fall of 2017.

Erika Johnson, MHSA, Vice President for Strategic Research at Vizient Research Institute, gave a keynote presentation: “Health Care’s Tipping Point…Will Price Transparency Be the Answer?” (short answer from their research: no, it won’t be the answer). Other sessions at the meeting focused on additional issues facing departments in the current academic and health care system—research, student interest, physician and team well-being, and preparing for the “office of the future.” These included a session on Recruiting Students into Family Medicine led by Beat Steiner, MD, MPH, the current Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) President and the chair of ADFM’s Education Transformation Committee, Michelle Roett, MD, MPH, FAAFP, CPE, as well as some fantastic memberled presentations and panels: Growth of Departments and Expansion of Clinical Faculty; Key Chair Decisions in Building Research & Scholarship Capacity; and Making the “Business Case” for the Well-Being and Office of the Future.

Our meeting included some favorite longstanding sessions, such as topical discussion tables at breakfast (with nearly 25 topics this year!) and the Leadership & Management Dilemmas dinner workshop. We also tried several new things this year, including a meeting orientation, a “wellness” activity of yoga for all levels, and a lunch workshop for new department chairs. This year was the first year we designated meeting co-chairs to create a triad “leadership team” model of governance for the planning; these co-chairs will be the meeting chair in subsequent years, so this new model has allowed us to improve continuity between meetings and to get started on planning earlier. We look forward continuing to innovate, offer timely and relevant content, and engage in critical discussions at our 2020 Winter Meeting in New Orleans!

• © 2019 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.