Osteopathic medical education: Policy changes to improve health care

Osteopathic medical education could be improved by policy changes that focus on better funding support for community-based education, including directing resources to smaller communities and compensating busy physicians who serve as preceptors for medical students. Robert A. Cain, DO, FACOI, FAODM, president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, also emphasized the need for policies that better value primary care through improved compensation and reduced burdens, which would strengthen both osteopathic medical education and the primary care workforce.

Medical Economics: What are some policy changes, either at the state or federal level, that you would like to see that could really help osteopathic medical education?

Robert A. Cain, DO, FACOI, FAODME: Community-based education is challenging to operate, and when we look at so many of the institutions where our students train, their margins are small. Sometimes there's no margin at all, and we're asking them, on top of worrying about taking care of their community, to also train medical students and to enter into the education space. And sadly, when we look at decisions that are often made when those challenges begin, the first thing that goes is education. And so we do have one program we're currently working on called the Community TEAMS Act, which is trying to direct more funding into some of these smaller communities where we're training our students so that you can actually support the preceptors, the physicians who are doing the teaching. And that's important, because they're busy trying to take care of patients and teaching the sense, the sense is that they're giving something up. But for a long time that was always done for free. But as health care has changed, it becomes hard to be a teacher and a practitioner. So finding ways to better support those communities from a funding standpoint, into the teaching institutions, helping to make those local hospitals into teaching institutions for the type of model we use can be incredibly important, and so we do have a lot of advocacy work that is addressing that particular issue.

The other, I mentioned earlier in the cal is that unfortunately, primary care has for far too long in our system, both at the policy level and at the operational level, not really given the value to primary care that it should have. We talk a lot about primary care and the need for primary care, but we don't value it in the way that we need to. And I think that there's opportunity in the policy space to help to do that, and part of that is by leveling some of the playing field in terms of the compensation. It is hard to be a primary care physician, and working to ease some of the burden that they currently experience could help not only with their own well being and the care delivery, but with those people willing to be preceptors for our students.