Conference Tracks

Learn From and Engage With the Top Experts in Preventive Medicine

Jump To:  Community and Population Medicine | Clinical Preventive Medicine | Advances in the Preventive Medicine Specialty | Environmental and Global Health
 

Preventive Medicine 2025 will feature four content tracks:

• Community and Population Medicine
• Clinical Preventive Medicine
• Advances in the Preventive Medicine Specialty
• Environmental and Global Health 

Learn More About the Conference Tracks

Community and Population Medicine
Chair: Chelsea Isom, MD, MPH
Vice Chair: Eseosa Fernandes, MD, MS, MPH

The work of moving the needle to make a difference in the health of populations and in the lives of communities starts at the most upstream level, peripheral to and outside of direct patient care. Community medicine entails the practice or application of community-level interventions to improve population health outcomes, carried out through the public health system. It is often called community health when the emphasis is on program implementation, assessment, evaluation, and policy development at and for the community level. On the other hand, population medicine entails the practice or application of population-level interventions to improve population health outcomes, carried out through the healthcare system. It is often called “population health management” when the emphasis is on the non-clinical components of healthcare (e.g., health system redesign, system-wide QI initiatives, etc), and “population health” when the healthcare system’s focus is on the broader population of the catchment area that it is responsible for, beyond those who are currently patients in the system. This core track aims to create a forum for reporting and discussing initiatives in those core areas of preventive medicine and public health at PM2025.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Communicable disease control programs
• Epidemiologic surveillance initiatives
• Health education for the community through public health messaging and communication
• “Health in all policies” initiatives
• Development and implementation of health promotion policies and programs
• Governmental public health infrastructure development and capacity-building
• Interventions to address the social determinants of health for both acute or chronically ill patients as well as otherwise healthy population
• Healthcare system transformation efforts
• Quality assessment, quality improvement, quality control, or quality assurance initiatives
• Addressing the needs of high-risk or complex patients (e.g., poly-pharmacy, multi-morbidity, greater number of social needs, or more complex social needs) at a community or systems level
• The role and impact of technology on enhancement of clinical services

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Clinical Preventive Medicine
Chair: Sherry Mills, MD, MPH
Vice Chair: Rachel Annam, MD, MPH

Clinical preventive entails the clinical practice of preventive medicine, which is broadly understood to mean screening, harm reduction strategies, chemoprophylaxis (i.e., preventive medications such as statins and aspirin), and behavioral counseling. It may also include additional and more emergent areas, such as lifestyle medicine, and integrative medicine. It may be practiced in a variety of clinical settings and in specialized clinics such as travel medicine, occupational health, obesity medicine, addiction medicine, just to name a few. This core track in PM2025 seeks to highlight all initiatives, including programs, policies, or other interventions, that covers the wide variety of clinical preventive medicine activities that PM and other physicians or clinicians are involved in or spearheading.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Implementation of USPSTF clinical preventive services in individual clinical practices or health systems
• Lifestyle medicine programs
• Occupational and employee health initiatives
• Obesity medicine
• Addiction medicine interventions
• Delivery of clinical preventive services for high social needs populations (e.g., innovations in how to overcome social determinants of health issues)
• Immigrant and migrant health considerations, policies and services
• Infectious/communicable disease surveillance, control and prevention interventions
• Non-communicable chronic disease surveillance, control and prevention interventions

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Advances in the Preventive Medicine Specialty
Chair: Major Terra Forward, MD, MBA, MPH
Vice-Chair: Karla Vega-Colon, MD

The public health and general preventive medicine specialty, herein referred to as PM, continues to face challenges to its workforce. Notably, these challenges include: limited funding opportunities to train PM residents; a difficult legislative, policy, and regulatory environment with regards to PM residency funding, PM recognition as a critical medical specialty, and the job market for PM-trained physicians; and lack of awareness of PM as a specialty at all levels of the medical education continuum, just to name a few. However, many residency programs, healthcare researchers and scholars, as well as employers are finding ways to integrate PM into their organizations, teams, and systems. This core track provides an opportunity for all those entities to highlight their work in these areas at PM2025. This core track will also coordinate with the ACPM GME program staff lead to include the contents of the Program Director (PD) workshop into the PM2025 conference schedule as appropriate.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Ongoing PM residency training program innovations for residents
• Efforts to create new PM residency  training programs
• Funding streams for residency training in PM
• Experiential and evidence-based guidance on how to find and secure jobs for PM graduates and early career PM physicians
• Initiatives to expand what PM docs can do, including new kinds of clinics, additional competencies, core functions, skills, or knowledge bases
• Credentialing and privileging PM physicians
• Experiences from the ACPM fellows
• Experiences from the field from residency programs funded by HRSA, CDC, and other agencies
• Advances from ACPM on behalf of the specialty, such as the campaign “This is PM” and Vaccine Ambassadors
• New training mechanisms relevant to PM, such as but not limited to the new ABPM fellowship in healthcare administration, leadership and management (HALM)
• Interventions to introduce PM into undergraduate and graduate medical education

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Environmental and Global Health
Chair: Michael Jan, MD, MPH, FACPM
Vice Chair: Namita Akolkar, MD

In this century, it is becoming ever more clear that environmental factors pose a major threat to human health. From natural and biological environmental factors such as COVID-19 and Ebola, to anthropogenic and geophysical factors such as climate change, industrial pollution, and desertification, there seems to be no end to the environmental challenges that can influence population health. At the same time, there are known approaches, some more successful than others, at dealing with these environmental threats to human health. Lastly, because environmental health threats do not respect local, regional, or national borders, there is a need to consider these challenges from a global (rather than only a local, regional, or national) perspective. This special emphasis track will highlight these areas at PM2025, with the goal of providing a mechanism for sharing scholarly, intellectual, as well as practical ways to identify and deal with these environmental health crises.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

• “One health” approaches to teaching, learning, and implementing programs to improve human health
• Salutogenesis and its role as a theory, orientation, model, and platform for health promotion and health protection
• Public health emergency preparedness training and program evaluation
• Applications of the principles of public health preparedness to making prevention the norm in healthcare systems, public health systems, and society
• Climate change curricular, training, and policy interventions
• Epidemiology of climate-related crises, such as migration, refugee population displacement, and mortality from heat, flooding, and other environmental causes of death
• Cross-, inter-, and multi-disciplinary approaches to addressing environmental health factors, as well as generating and implementing environmental health solutions
• Approaches to account for the role of social determinants of health in the impact of environmental factors on population health
• Environmental justice initiatives

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