2022 Building Trust & Equity in IM Training Grant Recipients

2022 Building Trust Through Diversity, Health Care Equity, and Inclusion in Internal Medicine Training Grant Program

In July 2022,  Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine (AAIM), the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), the ABIM Foundation, the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation awarded a total of $400,000, split among 24 projects at medical schools and training programs.

Learn more about the selected projects:

• Advocate Aurora Health ($20,000): Create focused project devoted to environmental health, a root cause of inequity, through (1) establishing an environmental health elective for the residency, (2) hosting two interprofessional grand rounds accredited continuing ed sessions focusing on the intersection of climate and racism. In the elective, residents will work with community partners to achieve a targeted environmental health goal and rotate with community health nurses to assess environmental barriers to health. 
• Allegheny Health Network ($10,000): Internal medicine residents will participate in a experiential learning session at the beginning of their residency, visiting important local organizations that serve the community, including a homeless shelter, a food bank and other organizations. They will meet local leaders, who will explain what does and doesn’t work in their communities. The project’s goal is to enhance residents’ comprehension of social determinants of health and their impact, to inform their future care of patients. 
• Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine/Case Western ($20,000):  Launch Mentor Families program for Northeast Ohio high school students considering a career in medicine or health care, including the development of eight modules to expose students to multiple health care fields. Students will participate in career exploratory panels, plan their undergraduate education, and prepare for a career in health care while learning techniques to foster resilience, overcome barriers, and seize unique career opportunities.  
• Columbia University ($10,000): This project seeks to use the concept of sociocultural humility to improve residents’ skills in providing care to patients from different social and cultural backgrounds. Residents will learn about the concepts and techniques of expressing sociocultural humility, practice using them, and reflect on the experience. They will also participate in a service project in partnership with a community organization. 
• Cooper Medical School at Rowan University ($10,000): Internal medicine/primary care residents and LPNs will participate in an intensive oral history training workshop to learn active listening and communication skills that will foster trust with their patients, and to strengthen the relationships among and between the physicians and nurses.  
• Dignity Health ($20,000):  This project will use didactic education and experiential opportunities with community-based organizations and disadvantaged youth to enhance internal medicine residents’ understanding of the interplay between social determinants of health and the importance of health equity. The project team will measure Black, southeast Asian and Hispanic community members’ trust as a baseline, and residents will follow a cultural competency/sensitivity curriculum to increase their awareness of the beliefs, values and biases they bring to patient encounters, and improve their ability to interact effectively with individuals different from themselves.  
• Eastern Virginia Medical School ($20,000):  This grant supports a Vaccine Hesitancy project that will (1) assess attitudes and perceptions of residents and medical students about vaccines, and their interest in addressing vaccine hesitancy and medical misinformation with patients and the public; (2) educate residents and medical students about vaccines, vaccine hesitancy and opposition, and the best approaches to responding to medical misinformation; (3) provide simulations to help residents and students practice addressing misinformation concerns with standardized patients; and (4) participate in existing inter-professional community outreach teams in local clinics. 
• Geisinger ($10,000): Geisinger will develop a curriculum designed to promote awareness of bias in health care and bridge specific knowledge and skill gaps in the delivery of culturally competent services. The curriculum will be delivered to internal medicine and pediatrics residents and nurses employed in general internal medicine clinics. It will include both didactic material related to health disparities and particular issues of concern for diverse populations, as well as sessions with standardized patients.  
• Honor Health ($20,000):  This project seeks to demonstrate how health care organizations can address DEI through the formation of People Resource Groups, affinity groups based on race, ethnicity, gender and/or orientation. These groups would be inter-professional and would design and develop opportunities in the domains of education, allyship and advocacy. They would test the effectiveness of the approach with two groups – Native Americans and LGBQT. 
• Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai ($20,000): Modernize information exchange in accordance with antiracist and patient-centered communication principles to assure equitable documentation across the medical record. Pilot programs to bring HIT patient navigators to the bedside to perform point of care health technology literacy and needs assessments and stimulate community-driven digital transformation strategies to improve patient-physician partnerships and documentation practices.
• Lankenau Medical Center ($20,000): Internal medicine residents and fellows will assist in conducting a course at Cheyney University, an HBCU, on the Philosophy of Building Trust in Healthcare. At the conclusion of the course, participants will create a video on mistrust and trust-building, based on course findings; disseminate the video through faith leaders in Philadelphia; and the health system and university will co-sponsor a national seminar on building trust in health care.               
• Oregon Health & Science University ($20,000): This project is to create a Health Equity Action Team that will develop a trainee-led equity curriculum. The project leaders would survey trainees and faculty about their experiences with how bias and discrimination affects learning, and recruit a cohort of residents, students and faculty who will develop a justice- and equity-informed educational curriculum and toolkit. The Action Team will also design and validate a bedside teaching rounds equity education checklist to assess faculty on teaching wards.  
• Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital ($10,000): Internal medicine residents in a community hospital will take a twoyear inter-professional course on disparities and inequities in health and health care. Quarterly noon conference workshops will incorporate educational methodologies, including lectures, large and small group discussions, guest speakers from community-based and global organizations, interactive data gathering, and asynchronous self-reflections.
• SUNY Upstate Medical University ($10,000): This project aims to improve residents’ verbal and non-verbal communication skills, improve inter-professional team skills, and prepare residents to better recognize health care disparities, equity, and bias. This will be done with a residency curriculum with simulated patient encounters addressing challenging cases focusing on language, bias, and cultural barriers. 
• Temple University ($10,000): This project seeks to bridge the gap between the medical establishment and the LGBTQ community, and in the process, innovate a new educational model that can be used to train resident physicians. The primary outcome will be improved training on LGBTQ health for the Internal Medicine residents. They will also include members along the spectrum of care so that trainees can learn to be leaders in this important pursuit.
• University of Arkansas ($20,000): This project would identify, audit and modify the use of stigmatizing language in internal medicine patient charting through development of a trainee-led research program. Residents would be involved in each step of the research plan, thereby learning about the prevalence and consequences of stigmatizing language. The team would first identify stigmatizing language through a literature review and qualitative methods, and then develop coding techniques and artificial intelligence algorithms to audit records for such language, working with the clinical informatics department.
• University of California-San Diego ($20,000): Develop, implement and evaluate an academic/community partnership-based social justice curriculum within a primary care track of an internal medicine residency program. Project leaders will evaluate the baseline and change in knowledge, attitudes and skills of primary care residents imparted by the curriculum. 
• University of Colorado ($20,000): This is a proposal to create a one-year longitudinal anti-racist curriculum that would employ DEI simulation cases, with the central focus of understanding how trust and equity are built. The content and learning objectives of the curriculum will be informed by the results of patient focus groups. The curriculum will be developed and delivered by an inter-professional team, with the goal of fostering collaboration around building trust and equity in medicine. Ultimately, the project leader would seek to build a more extensive curriculum available to inter-professional members at her and other institutions. 
• University of Illinois – Chicago ($20,000): The Department of Medicine will develop educational sessions targeting the micro-aggressions experienced by department members (as reported through an anonymous survey). They will create two-hour interactive workshops for trainees and one-hour interactive sessions for faculty and staff. These workshops will offer strategies for recognizing and addressing micro-aggressions.
• University of Texas – Houston ($20,000): Create, implement and assess an innovative pilot pipeline program that integrates undergraduate students from underserved communities with interprofessional health students to address specific patient or community needs. Undergraduate students from the Rio Grande Valley will be recruited to participate in a curriculum designed to educate interprofessional students about social determinants of health and teach effective teamwork skills, and will also receive additional lectures on science topics. They will work with UT Health students on a capstone project designed to address an issue affecting their communities. They will also be assigned a faculty mentor. 
• University of Texas Medical Branch ($10,000):  The goal of this project is to develop and implement a career advancement intervention focused on faculty members who have been at the same rank for five years or more – a group that is predominantly composed of physicians who are women and/or members of groups that are historically under-represented in medicine.  These physicians will receive individualized career action plans and access to a virtual and interactive Career Advancement and Scholarship Hub. 
• University of Texas – San Antonio ($20,000): Residents would partner with community health workers (CHW) and visit families across San Antonio, working with community partners and focusing on areas of greatest health disparities. Residents will volunteer at community sites and help identify at-risk patients, who will then receive care form a resident/CHW dyad; this care will focus on health literacy and social determinants of health. Residents will also have a monthly core didactic series, which will incorporate CHWs. 
• University of Washington ($20,000): Create inter-professional Health Equity and Anti-Racism (HEAR) Curriculum for internal medicine residents. Residents will learn through a didactic and discussion-based curriculum in the first three months, followed by clinic-based advocacy work through all three years of training. A group of residents will complete a capstone scholarly project, during which they can work with community organizations, educators, and/or researchers to advance health equity and rebuild trust with historically marginalized communities. 
• Yale ($20,000): This pilot project would involve recruiting under-represented in medicine and low-income students as medical scribes while providing guidance to enter the medical field across the spectrum of health care professions. Training will include pre-clinical training followed by clinical apprenticeship, and include career coaching from an interdisciplinary group of health care professionals, educators, peers and community sponsors. Participants will learn about various health care careers and receiving networking opportunities. 

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