Embracing Our New Realities

For over 2 years, we have been living with the uncertainty that the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in. This year, despite remaining hopeful, assessing our risk with epidemiologic modeling, polling our members for their preferences, and reviewing our event location safety practices, we made the decision to postpone our regularly scheduled Annual Conference dates in February 2022 due to COVID-19 surges. After careful consideration and ongoing monitoring, we excitedly and carefully met with our membership, June 8-10, 2022 in Denver, Colorado.

“Embracing Our New Realities” was the theme and the subtext of the 2022 ADFM Annual Conference. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed reality as we know it; our Annual Conference content was designed to embrace these changes and remind each other of what we can take away from the inequities exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic. Our former President, Chelley Alexander, MD, opened our Annual Conference by discussing our new reality and reflecting on the major life changes we experienced together. Dr Alexander eloquently relayed that we have to adapt and continue to learn to thrive in an age of disasters. While disasters have reshaped care as we know it, they have also opened doors and opportunities to collaborate better, to care for patients more thoroughly, and to embrace harmonization.

We moved on to our keynote speaker, Jonathan A. Patz. Dr Patz, the director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, led our plenary session “The Climate Crisis and Our Health: Priority Roles and Opportunities for Primary Care.” Dr Patz served as a lead author for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for 15 years and as a family physician has a unique understanding of the way that climate change impacts family medicine and our overall health. Dr Patz reinforces that “Family Medicine Departments are ideally positioned to lead the discourse and train the next generation of trusted messengers and change-makers to help solve the climate crisis... and our health will enormously benefit in the process of reaching a clean energy economy.”

Hope Wittenberg, MA, our wonderful director of governmental relations, who will be retiring this year after 30 years of service, gave her last policy update. She will be deeply missed and we wish her the best! Hope’s updates nicely dovetailed into an interactive workshop on “Advocacy in your family medicine department.” The small group work for this session focused on department and faculty advocacy efforts in any of the following areas: promoting family medicine and primary care; addressing climate change; promoting equity and diversity; and more.

Our penultimate session of the day focused on advancements in our new reality with a session on Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML), led by Bob Phillips, MD, MSPH, and Andrew Bazemore, MD, MPH. Drs Phillips and Bazemore discussed the power AI has to transform family medicine and introduced a panel of ADFM members to share how AI/ML is being used in their departments, with examples including imaging for diabetic retinopathy, AI-based language processing, and machine learning for social determinants of health.

To end the first day, we held a panel discussion on integrating behavioral health and primary care with Susan McDaniel, PhD, Frank DeGruy, MD, MSFM, and Stacy Ogbeide, PsyD. Each panelist discussed the journey of integrating behavioral health within their departments. They detailed some of the roadblocks, the successes, and the differences in integrating behavioral health in an institution with strong support, mid-level support, and little to no support. Following suit the next day was a session on understanding social determinants of health (SDOH) to address integrating social care with health care. This discussion was led by Alicia Cohen, MD, MSC, and panelists included Shalina Nair, MD, and Carlos Jaen, MD who elaborated on concepts of SDOH and ways to address SDOH in health care, including examples of partnering with food banks and through community-based care programs.

Christine Arenson, MD moderated a workshop on “Sustaining Support for the Academic Mission with Increasing Clinical Demands.” Attendees were able to select the size/type of their clinical enterprise and workshop with others on managing up (engaging with our health systems to create realistic clinical expectations for academic faculty/departments) and managing down (engaging with our faculty to create rewarding and equitable workplaces).

We closed the 2022 ADFM Annual Conference with 2 impactful sessions, the first on the experiences of sponsoring, coaching, and mentoring (SCM) for women and underrepresented chairs. In addition to articulating the differences in SCM, Dean Seehusen, MD, MPH, and Jeanette South-Paul, MD described themes from the experiences of women and BIPOC chairs, and highlighted strategies related to SCM that can be applied in academic departments to better support women and BIPOC faculty and leaders. Lastly, we concluded with stories from 2 of our members who shared their experiences of battling illness as an academic physician leader and how the perspective of being a patient can better prepare you to provide the care we would want for ourselves.

It was an impactful and successful conference after the delay to gather again in person; we are so grateful for the opportunity to convene and grow together as we embrace our new realities.

• © 2022 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.