Our Priorities

The Foundation’s grantmaking is focused on projects that:

• Demonstrate or encourage interprofessional education and teamwork among health care professionals;
• Provide new curriculum content for health professional education, including patient safety, quality improvement, systems performance and professionalism;
• Develop new models for clinical education, including graduate medical education reform;
• Improve education for the care of underserved populations, with an emphasis on primary care; and
• Increase faculty skills in health professions education with a special emphasis on the career development of underrepresented minorities.

About Our Priorities

Interprofessional education and teamwork
We have strong evidence that health care delivered by well-functioning teams leads to better outcomes, but we still educate our health professionals in silos. We need more planned and rigorous interprofessional education.

New curriculum content
We do a very good job of teaching the biologic and physical sciences as the basis for the practice of medicine, but we have not done as well incorporating other content such as patient safety, quality improvement and population health in our teaching. We need to broaden and integrate our curriculum across the educational continuum.

New models for clinical education
The management of chronic diseases over time, primarily in outpatient or community-based settings, is the predominant work of health care professionals today, but clinical education is still largely focused on episodic care and is predominately hospital-based. We need new sites and longitudinal models for clinical education and training.

Education for the care of underserved populations
A large number of people enter the health professions each year, but an insufficient number of health professionals choose to serve in rural and inner-city areas and some of the most vulnerable people in society—racial and ethnic minorities, elderly people, low-income patients and others—are not receiving the care they need. We need to provide training and incentives that support and promote care that meets the needs of these underserved populations.

Career development in health professions education
In developing the next generation of national leaders in health professions education, creative faculty members devoted to educational reform must be nurtured. In addition, while we have made progress, we need to diversify the health professions if we are to achieve our goal of uniform excellence in health care.

Read more about the history of our priorities.