NRSA for Primary Medical Care - Primary care is whole-person, accessible, comprehensive health care when you need it. It is provided by interprofessional teams, who have sustained relationships with patients, families, and communities. Despite broad public agreement that primary care is important for prevention and chronic disease management, primary care is facing a crisis, i.e., worsening clinician shortages, uneven access to care and rising costs. There is a critical need to train the next generation of primary care researchers to generate and implement the evidence needed to transform and sustain the delivery of high quality, accessible primary care to improve the nation’s health. The purpose of the Johns Hopkins Integrated Medicine & Pediatrics Advancing Primary Care Research and Transformation (JH-IMPACT) training program is to train postdoctoral physicians (M.D./D.O.), other clinicians (e.g., RN/Ph.D.) and scientists (Ph.D.) to become independent primary care researchers, who produce rigorous, actionable evidence to innovate and transform primary care delivery. The program is housed within two long-standing, well-integrated and highly successful fellowship programs at Johns Hopkins University: General Internal Medicine and General Academic Pediatrics Fellowships. Together, these programs will train nine JH-IMPACT fellows over five years. We designed a program to accomplish the three HRSA objectives: 1) Develop and enhance research training opportunities for individuals interested in careers in primary care research; 2) Increase the number of researchers focused on primary care issues that transform health care delivery; and 3) Share fellows’ research findings to advance primary care. Core training activities include: 1) individualized mentoring teams led by experienced primary care research mentors; 2) formal methodological coursework, including a master’s degree for eligible fellows; 3) completion of mentored, independent primary care research projects; 4) structured career development activities; 5) primary care research seminars and works-in-progress sessions that build fellows’ capacity to design, critique, and present research; and 6) dissemination, translation and stakeholder engagement training to enable fellows to share their findings with multiple stakeholders. Our evaluation approach includes assessment of our applicant pool and recruitment approaches, continuous monitoring of fellows’ progress using individualized development plans and Fellowship Advisory Committee reviews every 6 months and assessment of short and long-term outcomes (abstracts, presentations, publications, dissemination activities, grants, faculty positions) of JH-IMPACT alumni. By the end of their 2-3-year fellowship, JH-IMPACT graduates will have a defined primary care research focus, methodological skills, publications, experience disseminating findings, and the skills to transition to a research-related career. JH-IMPACT will expand primary care research training capacity at Johns Hopkins and produce investigators prepared to generate, disseminate, and implement evidence that improves primary care delivery, access, affordability, quality, safety, and ultimately, population health for all Americans.
