Integrative Medicine in Preventive Medicine Education

During 2012, the USDHHS’s Health Resources and Services Administration funded 12 accredited preventive medicine residencies to incorporate an evidence-based integrative medicine curriculum into their training programs. It also funded a national coordinating center at the American College of Preventive Medicine, known as the Integrative Medicine in Preventive Medicine Education (IMPriME) Center, to provide technical assistance to the 12 grantees. To help with this task, the IMPriME Center established a multidisciplinary steering committee, versed in integrative medicine, whose primary aim was to develop integrative medicine core competencies for incorporation into preventive medicine graduate medical education training. The competency development process was informed by central integrative medicine definitions and principles, preventive medicine’s dual role in clinical and population-based prevention, and the burgeoning evidence base of integrative medicine. The steering committee considered an interdisciplinary integrative medicine contextual framework guided by several themes related to workforce development and population health. A list of nine competencies, mapped to the six general domains of competence approved by the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education, was operationalized through an iterative exercise with the 12 grantees in a process that included mapping each site’s competency and curriculum products to the core competencies. The competencies, along with central curricular components informed by grantees’ work presented elsewhere in this supplement, are outlined as a roadmap for residency programs aiming to incorporate integrative medicine content into their curricula. This set of competencies adds to the larger efforts of the IMPriME initiative to facilitate and enhance further curriculum development and implementation by not only the current grantees but other stakeholders in graduate medical education around integrative medicine training. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Address correspondence to: Asim A. Jani, MD, MPH, Preventive Medicine Residency and Fellowship, CDC, MS E-92, 1600 Clifton Rd NE, Atlanta GA 30333. [email protected].. No financial disclosures were reported by the authors of this paper. HHS Public Access Author manuscript Am J Prev Med. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 January 20. Published in final edited form as: Am J Prev Med. 2015 November ; 49(5 0 3): S222–S229. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2015.08.019. A uhor M anscript