For the third year in a row, the Annual Educational Conference is featuring three theme-focused sessions following the Welcome and CEO Address on Friday morning. This year’s conference theme, Engaging Each Other: Transformation through Collaboration, encompasses an array of applications in health care and GME. These three sessions speak to that range, underscoring central issues facing physicians at all levels of experience.

For more than two years, the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed how every person on the globe works, plays, and interacts with each other. As what many hoped would be a few weeks of fear and uncertainty stretched into months and months, no one felt this stress more than health care professionals on the frontlines.

Health provider shortage areas, comprised of urban and rural regions with high populations of people struggling with multi-morbidity and poverty, often have a challenge with physician recruitment. Dr. Meaghan Ruddy, vice president for Academic Affairs and director of Medical Education for The Wright Center for GME in Scranton, Pennsylvania, describes how a teaching health center family medicine program operationalized as a graduate medical education safety-net consortium.

2023 Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Awardee Dr. Alec O’Connor was the program director of the internal medicine residency program at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry for the last 10 years; he recently transitioned into the associate program director role for the same program.

Dr. Nasca and two others received the inaugural National Award for Outstanding Leadership in Support of Clinician Well-Being for their work as co-chairs of the National Academy of Medicine's Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being.

In 2016, a Castlight Health report named Wilmington, North Carolina, the city with the highest abuse opioid abuse rate in the US. In response, Joseph Pino, MD, MHA, and members of the community sought to safely reduce the number of opioids prescribed, increase adherence to best practices in opioid prescribing, and reduce emergency department visits due to opioid overdose. His poster, presented at the 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference, reports the outcome of these multiple initiatives.

2022 David C. Leach Awardee Han Yu Stephanie Liou, MD is a primary care pediatrician at Alivio Medical Center – a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in Chicago. Dr. Liou recently completed a general pediatrics residency at the University of Chicago Comer Children's Hospital.

A Q and A with Dr. Cassandra Fritz of the internal medicine residency at Washington University in St. Louis, which is being recognized with a 2025 ACGME Barbara Ross-Lee, DO Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award.

This week's e-Communication includes information on the ACGME's position on the Annual Educational Conference, a webinar on assessing residents and fellows, Review and Comment, participation opportunities in the Milestones 2.0 program, and more.