ABIM FOUNDATION

The ABIM Foundation's mission is to advance medical professionalism to improve health care. Today's definition of medical professionalism is evolving—from autonomy to accountability, from individual's expert opinion to evidence-based medicine, from individual responsibility to teamwork and shared responsibility and from maximizing economic interests to social justice.

For many physicians, medical professionalism is the “heart and soul of medicine." More than the adherence to a set of medical ethics, it is the daily expression of what originally attracted them to the field of medicine—a desire to help people and society as a whole by providing quality health care to those in need.

Our work is dedicated to exploring how physician leaders, health care organizations and public policy can foster medical professionalism and intrinsic motivation at all levels as a means to improve health care for everyone.

We define professionalism through Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium: A Physician Charter, which articulates the professional principles and commitments to which physicians aspire. The Physician Charter espouses three fundamental principles: the primacy of patient welfare, patient autonomy, and social justice. It includes ten professional commitments: professional competence, honesty with patients, patient confidentiality, maintaining appropriate relations with patients, improving quality of care, improving access to care, the just distribution of finite resources, scientific knowledge, maintaining trust by managing conflicts of interest, and professional responsibilities.

Our initiatives include programs that advance the professional values and behaviors articulated in the Physician Charter, engage health care leaders in an ongoing conversation exploring ways to improve care, and convene individuals and organizations to stimulate change and innovation.

Since 2012, the Foundation's flagship initiative has been Choosing Wisely®, a campaign it leads in partnership with Consumer Reports and 75 societies representing physicians and other clinicians. Choosing Wisely aims to advance a national dialogue on avoiding wasteful or unnecessary medical tests, treatments and procedures. The campaign focuses on conversations between clinicians and patients informed by evidence-based recommendations of “Things Providers and Patients Should Question." As part of Choosing Wisely, and with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we are also working with health care provider organizations and consumer groups to reduce their use of tests and treatments that our clinical partners have said are performed too frequently.

The Foundation also operates small grant programs that are designed to support professionalism, including initiatives to train residents and medical students to avoid providing unnecessary care, to help practicing physicians combat challenges to professionalism in their practices, and to support physician society efforts to educate their members about important patient safety issues.

The Foundation is governed by a Board of Trustees comprised of both physicians and non-physician experts from a wide swath of health care, including medicine, research and policy. The Foundation also seeks Trustees who can help broaden its thinking in how to solve challenging issues in health care, such as individuals with expertise in new technologies or those that can help provide patient perspectives.

The Board helps set the strategic direction for the organization and provides counsel to the Foundation's staff. Half of the Foundation's Trustees have served on the American Board of Internal Medicine, the professional organization that certifies more than one in four doctors in the US. The collective experience of our public and ABIM emeriti Trustees allows many Foundation initiatives to find advocates who can connect Foundation initiatives with relevant actors in the health care delivery system.

Foundation staff includes individuals with many years of experience and specialized knowledge in their respective fields, including health care policy, public health, grant making, law, and communications. The Foundation's President and CEO previously practiced general internal medicine and geriatrics for nearly 30 years, as well as two years in a leadership role at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Innovation Center. The Foundation's Executive Vice President/Chief Operating Officer has more than 40 years of experience in the health care field, including previously serving for nearly 20 years as the founding president and CEO of the Alliance of Community Health Plans (formerly The HMO Group), the nation's leading association of not-for-profit and provider-sponsored health plans.

The Foundation's strength lies in its ability to convene organizations and individuals and inspire them to take action around a shared cause. For example, more than 75 medical specialty societies are partners in the Choosing Wisely campaign, collectively representing more than 1 million health care providers in the United States. Many hospitals and health systems have also embraced Choosing Wisely and are adopting its ideals into practice to reduce unnecessary tests and treatments and improve care for their patients.

The Foundation has also developed a number of strong partnerships in support of its goals, including with Consumer Reports to educate patients about the Choosing Wisely campaign, and AcademyHealth to accelerate research aimed at reducing low-value care.

The Foundation's major accomplishment in recent years has been to marshal physician professionalism to help inspire and shape a national conversation about the overuse of tests and treatments through Choosing Wisely. The campaign now includes nearly 500 clinical recommendations and more than 100 patient-friendly explanations from Consumer Reports about unnecessary care.

We believe the campaign has helped drive a significant increase in attention to overuse in the medical community, as demonstrated by the near-doubling in the number of articles in peer-reviewed journals about the topic between 2014 and 2015. Choosing Wisely has also begun to change how medicine is practiced, with health systems implementing recommendations and reducing their utilization of unnecessary tests and treatments. Its reach now extends beyond the United States, with sister campaigns in nearly 20 nations.

Medical professionalism has many facets and much work remains to be done to achieve a health care system that achieves the principles of maintaining the primacy of patient welfare, patient autonomy and social justice.