Abstracts Category : Other

Vital Signs of U.S. Osteopathic Medical Residency Programs Pivoting to Single Accreditation Standards

by Timothy S Novak

Osteopathic physician (D.O.) residency programs that do not achieve accreditation under the new Single Accreditation System (SAS) standards by June 30, 2020 will lose access to their share of more than $9,000,000,000 of public tax dollars. This U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) funding helps sponsoring institutions cover direct and indirect resident physician training expenses. A significant financial burden would then be shifted to marginal costs of the residency programs sponsoring institution in the absence of CMS funding. The sponsoring institutions ability or willingness to bare these costs occurs during a time when hospital operating margins are at historic lows (<i>Advisory.com /Daily Briefing /May 18, 2017 | The Daily Briefing / Hospital profit margins declined from 2015 to 2016, Moody's finds</i>). Loss of access to CMS funding may result in potentially cataclysmic reductions in the production and availability of primary care physicians for rural and urban underserved populations. Which osteopathic residency programs will be able to survive the new accreditation requirement changes by the 2020 deadline? What are some of the defining attributes of those programs that already have achieved <i>initial accreditation </i> under the new SAS requirements? How can the osteopathic programs in the process of seeking the new accreditation more effectively pivot by learning from those programs that have succeeded? What are the potential implications of SAS to both access and quality of health care to millions of Americans? This report is based upon a study that examined and measured how osteopathic physician residency programs in the U.S. are accommodating the substantive structural, financial, political and clinical requirements approximately half way through a five-year adaptation period. In 2014, US Graduate Medical Education (GME) physician program accreditation systems formally agreed to operate under a single accreditation system for all osteopathic (D.O) and allopathic (M.D.) programs in the U.S. Since July 1, 2015, the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) accredited training programs have been eligible to apply for Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) accreditation. This agreement to create a Single Accreditation System (SAS) was consummated among the AOA, the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM) and ACGME with a memorandum of understanding. As this research is published, the ACGME is transitioning to be <i>the</i> single accreditor for <i>all</i> US GME programs by June 30, 2020. At that time, the AOA would fully relinquish all its GME program accreditation responsibilities. The new SAS operates under published ACGME guidelines and governance. Business policy and health care resource allocation question motivated this research. Failure of osteopathic programs to pivot to the new standards could result in fewer licensed physicians being produced in the high demand primary care