A new online tool is helping residents and their training programs better understand at-risk populations—including the homeless, unemployed, underserved and uninsured—and improve their quality of care.
Created by the University of Michigan Medical School, the new tool known as “Caring for Compassion,” offers learning modules, games and a printable pocket guide on providing better quality care across bio-psychosocial domains. Poor people received worse care than high-income people for about 60 percent of quality measures, according to the 2013 National Healthcare Quality Report.
As medical education and residency programs place more emphasis on quality and safety, health disparities training will take on increasing importance. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) created its Clinical Learning Environment Review (CLER) program to bring this issue into focus, including ensuring residency programs offer experiential learning that helps residents develop the ability to identify and institute sustainable systems-based changes to address health care disparities.
Caring with Compassion will help residency programs meet CLER objectives—and it also will allow residents to be better prepared for the diagnosis and treatment of these at-risk populations in whatever specialty they may practice.
Future physicians will need to have a more comprehensive understanding of at-risk populations and be better prepared for caring for these patients. Some medical schools participating in the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative are building innovative education models that specifically address the unique needs of at-risk populations, including integrating population health into curricula and focusing on the unique care needs of those in rural or underserved populations.
