HomeP⁴P⁴ Evaluation Team

P⁴ Evaluation Team:

The central task of P⁴ is evaluation. The evaluation design is a 14-site, national comparative case study of family medicine residencies using both quantitative and qualitative data. The Oregon Health & Science University Department of Family Medicine houses the evaluation core for the Project, which is lead by Dr. Patricia Carney and Dr. Patrice Eiff. OHSU has a vital track record in conducting multi-site studies on health care delivery and health professions education.

The 14 participating sites were selected from 84 applications using a blinded peer-review process. Selection was based on the novelty of proposed innovations and diversity of key representative features, such as urban and rural settings, size of program, and community-based and university-based programs.

The P⁴ programs have been organized into a learning collaborative; IRB reviews have all been accomplished, and baseline measures have been established using both standardized and site-specific measures, which will be ascertained annually.

The P⁴ sites represent educational experiments initiated by the programs themselves; they are testing their best ideas about what is needed now to change the content, structure, and length of family medicine residency education. The pole star for these innovations is the Patient-Centered Medical Home.

P⁴ expects to use the results of these practical experiments to inform the primary care disciplines of what is needed and possible, and particularly to identify adjustments in what have become overly complex and dated residency accreditation requirements.

P⁴ represents the first serious reconsideration of the structure, length and content of family medicine residencies since primary care residencies were defined in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rigorous and timely evaluation is the defining feature of this endeavor.