Wright State team selected for nationwide interprofessional faculty development project

Imagine a new world in which your doctor works with a team of health care professionals, including behavioral health care providers, pharmacists, care managers and other health care providers, to provide you with the best physical and mental health care.

While this might have seemed impossible a few years ago, this innovative approach to health care is already beginning to transform the delivery of primary care. Under a patient-centered model, health care providers coordinate their efforts to provide effective physical and mental health care to patients across the entire health care system, from the hospital to home health care.

To help produce a better trained primary care workforce, the American Boards of Family Medicine, Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, along with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, created a new national professional development program, Professionals Accelerating Clinical and Educational Redesign (PACER).

The three-year program will build high-functioning interprofessional faculty teams equipped to transform their clinical practices and educational programs into organizations that will train primary care providers to work together in high-performing patient centered medical homes.

PACER selected the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine, the Wright State-Miami Valley College of Nursing and Health, Wright State School of Professional Psychology, Cedarville University School of Pharmacy and Kettering College Physician Assistant Program, as one of nine institutions nationwide chosen to participate in the new program because transformation efforts and interprofessional collaborations have already started at Wright State.

The PACER interprofessional teams will attend training sessions and work closely with expert coaches to develop and implement new models of interprofessional training in their primary care practices.

“The PACER project provides an opportunity to deepen and broaden the comprehensive and integrated approach we are using to prepare primary health care disciplines at Wright State. We will have the opportunity to share this with health care systems across Ohio and the United States,” said Therese Zink, M.D., professor and chair of the Department of Family Medicine at the Boonshoft School of Medicine and team leader for the Wright State group. “PACER provides an important initiative to bring the family medicine, internal medicine and pediatric departments together to share expertise and expand activities in their own residencies as well as deepen their efforts to partner with the other colleges and schools.”

PACER is funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation with matching funding from the Boards of Family Medicine, Internal Medicine and Pediatrics and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. The project is implemented and evaluated by educational researchers in the Department of Family Medicine at the Oregon Health and Science University. For more information about the program, go to pcpacer.org.