The COVID pandemic has highlighted the worldwide need for a better understanding of both this particular virus and of pandemics in general, as well for a more organized approach to developing and sharing new diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines for infectious diseases. At the same time, the tragically disproportionate effects of this pandemic have brought home the need to improve public health in the hardest-hit communities and to strengthen global cooperation in health care and science.

In the starkest way possible, for the first time in a century, we’re seeing that lives depend upon how we handle events like this. The world’s new appreciation for the value of science makes this a time of enlightenment, underlining the importance of investments in top-notch research and disease-management capabilities. But while some scientific efforts are advancing rapidly right now, other important projects may be stalled, with potential repercussions across multiple fields. How do we prioritize the most essential research, for the long term as well as the short term, while we’re constrained by these unprecedented times?

Join Anne Schuchat, MD, and Francis Collins, MD, PhD, as they discuss the pandemic, the vaccine progress, funding for research and public health, and initiatives to achieve greater diversity in medicine and science.

This session is closed to members of the media.

Medical education is shifting to adapt to keep pace with the rapid changes in health care and in society. Medical educators are called upon to equip the future health care workforce with the skills and knowledge to counter racism, understand bias, practice cultural awareness, and uphold the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the absence of a road map or curricular guidance. Although movement toward competency-based education is over 20 years old, the field is still without a common language and set of competencies across the continuum of medical education that can guide teaching and learning about DEI. This session will provide updates from a national longitudinal collaborative effort by a diverse working group of subject matter experts to develop cross-continuum competencies in DEI. The session will also highlight two AAMC-member institutions that have integrated the topics of race, racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion into the curriculum - Dr. Denise Davis and Dereck Paul from University of California San Francisco School of Medicine as well as Dr. Priya Garg and Kaye-Alese Green from Boston University School of Medicine. Participants will learn the foundational competencies expected of entering residents, entering faculty, and experienced attending physicians and preceptors regardless of specialty. Participants will also gain an understanding of how the competencies can be used to inform curricular design for undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education programs and how they can build across the continuum of training. Participants will engage in a live discussion about ways to teach and assess these new EDI competencies, which will inform a forthcoming AAMC report, New and Emerging Curricular Areas in Medicine: Competencies Across the Learning Continuum.

Learning Objectives:
• Describe the new DEI competencies for students, residents, and facult
• Examine strategies for integrating EDI competencies at the local level for teaching and assessment, including practical aspects of implementation.
• Identify resources to further support efforts toward competency-based education in EDI, including the MedEdPORTAL® Anti-Racism in Medicine Collection.

With all of the emerging changes to the health care delivery system and the COVID-19 pandemic, it is essential to understand the changes to federal regulations and other policies that will affect patients, faculty physicians, and teaching hospitals. This session will examine the latest regulatory initiatives by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the Office of Inspector General, and other regulatory agencies and discuss the impact on academic medicine. Topics will include physician payment policies, changes to the Medicaid program, hospital payment policies, the 340B Drug Pricing Program, quality programs, and waivers and flexibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Learning Objectives:
• Discuss how the new federal health care regulations, subregulatory guidance, and waivers and flexibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic affect academic medicine.
• Prepare your practice to implement and comply with new regulations and payment rates.
• Identify potential changes in the 2020-2021 regulatory space and recognize how to influence policymakers.

In the 19th century, medical beliefs based on theories of racial biological differences served to validate racism across institutional structures of American society. Research has shown that many of those racial myths linger in medicine today and contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in medicine. This session will explore historical racist beliefs that remain, how misinformation is perpetuated, and how automatic associations and hidden biases unintentionally influence patient care. Two institutions will highlight steps they have taken to address bias, stereotypes and misinformation in their curriculum, daily interactions, and practice of medicine.

Learning Objectives:
• Identify false beliefs about race from the past that continue to influence medicine today.
• Identify methods to address hidden biases, stereotypes, and misinformation that contribute to inequity.
• Highlight institutional interventions to dispel racist misinformation in medicine and teach antiracist practices.

If you can’t watch this session because you think you don’t have the time... well, that’s exactly WHY you should watch it.

Today, too many of us are caught up in toxic overload. Americans work longer hours than those in almost every other advanced economy. And that’s everyone — not just the health care workforce and those of us in the overcompetitive, overachieving culture of academic medicine. Imagine where we, from deans to medical students, would rank on the “overwhelmed” chart?

We’ve come to value busyness as a badge of honor in this country. But is all the time we pour into our jobs really ensuring that we’re doing our best work, much less leading healthy and full lives? Our culture of overwork is leading to burnout, stress, sickness, and disengagement. And it perpetuates gender inequality — an issue brought to the forefront when we started quarantining and homeschooling.

Brigid Schulte’s talk will draw on her extensive research and her work as director of the Better Life Lab and host of “Better Life Lab,” one of Apple’s top 50 podcasts. She’ll use stories and data to show how transforming our work culture at the individual and organizational level; shifting our mindsets; applying tools based on behavioral design; and focusing on mission, performance, flexibility, and healthy, happy workers yield not only better work, but also time for a better life.

Emmy Award-winning journalist and producer Ann Curry has witnessed unfathomable conflict, oppression, and inequality during her celebrated 30-plus-year career in television. As a former network news anchor and fearless international correspondent, Curry has covered topics ranging from global conflicts to humanitarian disasters.More recently, she served as executive producer of two critically acclaimed television series — We’ll Meet Again (for PBS) and Chasing the Cure (for TNT) — both of which demonstrate her exceptional ability to connect communities and inspire hope. In Curry’s “Witnessing Humanity” TED Talk, she cautions against perpetuating divisive us-versus-them narratives, warning that such polarization can “spread like viruses.”

In this plenary session, Curry will explore how our impulse to categorize people can often lead us down dangerous paths. After her talk, Bon Ku, MD, Thomas Jefferson University’s assistant dean for medical education and an advisor for Chasing the Cure, will join Curry for a conversation about a range of topics, including humanism in medicine, the patient’s perspective, gender equity, and resilience.

Creating safe, equitable, and inclusive environments where staff, learners, and faculty feel valued, respected, and a sense of belonging is essential to attract diverse talent to the field of academic medicine as well as to increase innovation, engagement, trust, and overall organizational success. This session will address the importance of inclusion in an academic medicine environment and particularly a systemic and holistic approach to this work that can also addresses racism and gender equity. Two institutions will highlight the work they have undertaken towards creating more inclusive cultures.

Learning Objectives:
• Discuss the importance of inclusion in academic medicine
• Identify strategies to address racism and gender equity as part of an overall inclusion strategy
• Highlight institutional interventions to create a culture of inclusion in academic medicine

Vivek Murthy, MD, is the 19th Surgeon General of the United States. Dr. Murthy’s commitment to medicine and health began early in life. Born in the United Kingdom as the son of immigrants from India, Dr. Murthy discovered the art of healing in his father’s medical clinic in Miami, Florida. A believer in the power of community, he and his sister co-founded VISIONS, a peer-to-peer HIV/AIDS education program in India, and Swasthya (“health and well-being” in Sanskrit), a community health partnership that trained women to defy the odds in their patriarchal villages and become health care providers and educators. Dr. Murthy is a Gold Humanism Honor Society member and a 2016 recipient of the National Humanism in Medicine Medal.

In this session, Dr. Murthy will share his commitment to humanism and discuss stories and inspiration from his New York Times 2020 best-selling book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. He will also be presented with the 2020 Vilcek-Gold Award for Humanism in Healthcare by Jan T. Vilcek, MD, PhD, chairman and CEO of the Vilcek Foundation; David J. Skorton, MD, president and CEO of the AAMC; and Richard I. Levin, MD, president and CEO of The Arnold P. Gold Foundation. The award honors an immigrant professional who has made extraordinary contributions to humanism in health care.

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated persistent health inequities in communities across the United States, exposing the structures, systems, and policies that create social and economic conditions that lead to health disparities, poor health outcomes, and lower life expectancy. At the same time, the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery amplified conversations about marginalization, focused oppression, racial profiling, and egregious acts of discrimination. Local and state policymakers, public health professionals, and academic medical centers have used this moment as a catalyst to address health equity in myriad ways, including developing legislation declaring racism a public health crisis. Legislative efforts aim to reevaluate current laws with a racial equity lens, understand how racism affects individual and population health, and promote policies that prioritize the health of people of color. In this discussion with the American Public Health Association Policy Center, a lawmaker who led an effort to have racism declared a public health crisis and a member from an academic medical center in their district will share their “why,” approach, and intended results.

Learning Objectives:
• Evaluate the role of local and state policy, public health professionals, and academic medicine in addressing racial equity and population health.
• List examples of resolutions from local and state governments that approach racism as a public health crisis.
• Identify the types of multisector partnerships needed to develop or refine policies that target the social determinants of health.

How do teaching hospital and health system leaders identify and tackle critical challenges during an era of uncertainty and unprecedented national events? A panel of senior-level organizational leaders will share how they have made strategic decisions for their organizations in the face of increasingly limited resources, changes in how we deliver and pay for care, the often-overwhelming demands of the COVID-19 pandemic, and systemic racism and health disparities across the nation. How do they prepare for and respond to unanticipated challenges? What do they consider when making enterprise-wide decisions, particularly as they relate to education, research, patient care, and the surrounding communities?

Learning Objectives:
• Understand how health system leaders prepare for and identify emerging challenges that will have important implications for their surrounding communities and their missions.
• Understand how these leaders make enterprise-wide decisions within the context of a rapidly changing environment and uncertain future.
• Hear real-life examples of how the panels successfully prepared for, identified, and tackled leadership challenges (including key factors for success).

As we’ve focused this year, of necessity, on COVID-19, the opioid epidemic has become less top of mind for many of us. But stay-at-home orders pushed those working toward sobriety into isolation while limiting their access to treatment. The New York Times called the coronavirus “a national relapse trigger.” The opioid crisis remains a crisis. True, prescribing patterns have declined, but 2.6 million Americans are still addicted to opioids.

In this session, we will hear from two individuals who have thoroughly researched this crisis. Travis Rieder, PhD, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University, suffered a severe injury in a motorcycle accident and found himself with a profound dependency on oxycodone. In the wake of that experience, he became driven to discover why medicine is so bad at dealing with prescription opioids. His book In Pain interweaves his personal story with scientific research and potential solutions. Beth Macy, an accomplished author, journalist, and storyteller, has spent years reporting on the opioid epidemic. Her 2019 book Dopesick explores the lives of young heroin users and their parents in rural Virginia while taking an intimate look at drug dealers and at the police officers, judges, doctors, and health activists struggling to fight the epidemic.

Dr. Rieder and Macy will share stories as well as frank recommendations for how physicians, residents, and students can help reverse the disturbing statistics.

The conditions in which a person lives, that is, their social determinants of health (SDOHs), play a large role in influencing their health outcomes. As such, addressing SDOHs has become a priority of hospitals and health systems, and payment models and screening tools to address these needs have been rolling out. Consequently, a question that remains is, what are the right approaches to addressing health-related social needs? This session aims to answer this question by sharing not only an overview from organizations intimately involved in experimenting in this space and what they have found at a high-level, but also the firsthand, on-the-ground experiences of institutions that have implemented assessment tools and interventions for screening, diagnosing, and referring patients; built community partnerships; and invested in social services directly, shedding light on what does and does not work and why. Additionally, with multiple organization types having a stake in addressing patients’ social needs, it becomes important to have a broader discussion on what the particular role of the health care system should be. This discussion is especially crucial because these efforts can become unsustainable if one type of organization attempts to do it all. Therefore, this session will also incorporate how these efforts can make financial sense; dovetail with care redesign or other social factor strategies across one’s organization, including economic development work, service learning, and community- and patient-partnered science; and ultimately affect one’s bottom line.

Learning Objectives:
• Assess what types of programs are available to address social needs and determinants, and list the results from participating institutions.
• Identify characteristics of successful interventions in addressing health-related social needs, noting what worked, what didn’t, and why.
• Identify the role that the health care system should play in addressing health-related social needs and social determinants of health.

Cato Laurencin, MD, PhD, will highlight the importance of Black representation in medicine, engineering, and science. Dr. Laurencin has dedicated a significant portion of his career addressing issues of diversity, and he will discuss racism in America and its history, the effect on present day, and the modern definition of racism.

Learning Objectives:
• Identify how messages of racism continue to manifest themselves.
• Explain the correlation between racism and health and health care disparities.
• Describe allostatic load and racism.
• Formulate next steps for a plan to address racism in academic medicine.

Every year, LSL features an in-depth Washington Update, a presentation by the AAMC chief public policy officer on the most important federal policy issues that affect academic medicine. In election years, which 2020 is, this presentation also includes a review of the outcomes of the recent congressional and presidential elections. However, from both a policy and an election perspective, 2020 is an extraordinary year. The Washington Update is consistently a much-anticipated, well-attended, and positively reviewed session.

Learning Objectives:
• Identify and examine the major federal policy developments in 2020 that have had or will have a significant effect on academic medicine.
• Identify and assess the outcomes of the 2020 national elections that could affect the future of academic medicine.
• Recognize new federal policy issues about which leaders in academic medicine are concerned and need more information.

The purpose of this session is to share examples of and pathways for the success of Black men in medicine. Black men in academic medicine have smaller professional networks than their White counterparts and fewer Black men advance to higher ranks. Furthermore, due to inequities, Black men have fewer role models of success.

Learning Objectives:
• Discuss the benefits of appreciating success stories of Black men in medicine.
• Describe the evidence that links supportive practices to improved success.
• Participate in appreciative inquiry to examine life at work.
• Develop a toolkit of practices that can promote success and appreciation.

As the health care system is transformed by growing adoption of a wide range of telehealth and related health technology services, training the current and future workforce to use these tools is necessary to ensure that tomorrow’s clinicians can provide high-quality care and facilitate access to care for patients. The AAMC recently completed a consensus set of telehealth competencies, developed with telehealth experts and medical educators from across the country. The session will feature overviews of telehealth training programs by Shruti Chandra and colleagues from Jefferson, Mark Avdalovic and peers from U.C. Davis, and Kimberly Noel and Erin Hulfish from Stony Brook Medicine.

Learning Objectives:
• Understand the continuum of UME, GME, and faculty-level competencies needed by clinicians to provide high quality care via telehealth.
• Incorporate telehealth competencies into the preclinical and clinical medical school curriculum.
• Summarize common opportunities and challenges experienced by others when incorporating telehealth into training for residents and medical students.