Fellowship Opportunity:
SOAR is sponsoring a visiting research fellowship. The fellow will study the relationship between residency outcomes and education/care delivery/workforce development best practices of family medicine residencies!
SOAR Fellows work directly with ABFM research staff and community-based subject matter experts and researchers to explore research questions, analyze residency outcome data, and prepare research manuscripts for publication and/or presentation.
The ABFM Foundation supports funding for this immersion experience and the AFMRD provides funding to the SOAR Fellow to present their research at the AAFP Residency Leadership Summit or a similar venue.
Eligible applicants must be a Program Director or Associate Program Director with an active AFMRD membership. Applicants should submit a CV and Letter of Interest by March 31, 2023, to jfetter@theabfm.org.
About SOAR:
AFMRD/ABFM/ABFM Foundation launched SOAR in the spring of 2022, establishing a five-year agreement to work together to achieve shared aims to advance excellence in family medicine residency education using outcomes data. The emerging AFMRD/ABFM/ABFM Foundation SOAR program has three primary workstreams to start: 1) a community of practice to discover and spread outcome-based “best practices” and socially accountable GME outcomes; 2) a scholarly fellowship to study the relationship between residency characteristics and desirable residency outcomes that inform SOAR; 3) GME Hub - a free web-based data resource that permits residency programs to understand better the outcomes of their programs using multi-source data from ABFM, Medicare, ACGME, HRSA, Robert Graham Center, HealthLanscape, Center for Professionalism and Value, etc.
While the ABFM recently signed an agreement with AAFP HealthLandscape to partner with the ABFM Foundation to construct the beginnings of the GME Hub website (Starting December 2022 and extending over 2 years), the initial start of the SOAR work will occur in 2023 with an initial focus on workstream one - using a community of practice to identify and prioritize outcomes measures and identify patterns that seem to demonstrate a unique structure/outcomes that are “positive deviants.”
Communities of practice use a variety of means to discover and highlight positive deviance (AKA PD Approach). Two of the key principles of Positive Deviance is “The community owns the entire process” and “the community designs ways to practice and amplify successful behaviors and strategies to unleash innovation.” For SOAR, the initial “starter community” is the active membership of the AFMRD, specifically program directors and associate program directors. The ABFM and ABFM Foundation are delighted to provide resources for this partnership including financial support, data and analytics, staffing, subject matter expertise, and program management knowledge to achieve the goals of SOAR.