This year marks the first time addiction medicine fellowship programs will operate under the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Nearly 50 fellowships were started under the Addiction Medicine Foundation, many of which are now in the first round of applicants for ACGME accreditation.
But with the projected need for physicians who specialize in addiction medicine, 75-80 new fellowships will need to be developed for accreditation. In this video from the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) annual meeting, Timothy K. Brennan, MD, of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai in New York City, highlights this latest development.
Following is a transcript of his remarks:
ACGME as it's known, has been a real game-changer for addiction medicine. Prior to our acceptance by the American Board of Medical ڴŮ (ABMS), we were accredited as fellowship programs by something called the American Board of Addiction Medicine, and then something more recently called the Addiction Medicine Foundation. Essentially what that meant was that we were accrediting ourselves as a field, which is common in organized medicine.
When we became part of the board of American Medical ڴŮ, however, it allowed the programs to then transition and apply to the ACGME. The ACGME are the very definition of organized medical training programs. And by joining them, not only did it give our field a lot more exposure, but it opened up the fellowship programs themselves to partake of the money that comes from D.C. to help train and pay for residents and fellows around the country -- so residents and fellows in pediatrics, surgery, OB/Gyn, emergency medicine. All that funding tends to come from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid in D.C.
Now that we're part of ABMS, and can apply for ACGME recognition, we can fund our own programs with those same CMS dollars, so it's a real game-changer for the field. Not only are we here to stay from a legitimacy standpoint, but we can sort of fund ourselves, which is huge.
First and foremost we're looking for physicians from any medical specialty -- we are a true multispecialty subspecialty. In that sense, somebody just has to have completed a residency program in some primary field. Some people might complete it in psychiatry, others might complete it in internal medicine, pediatrics, OB, it doesn't matter. As long as they've completed a residency, we'll take them. That's on the applicant side of things. It's a 1-year fellowship program, and then people are eligible to sit for board certification in addiction medicine.
For the programs that might be interested in establishing a program they need to have about three faculty members, two of whom have to be certified in addiction medicine, and one of whom has to be certified in psychiatry. So you don't actually need a giant cadre of faculty members in order to open a program, and in fact many of our programs are quite small. But the goal of course is to establish them throughout the country.
The opioid crisis -- we all read the papers -- it's in every news article. The light is shining very brightly on addiction medicine, and one of the things we've seen is that America's medical schools are waking up to this problem. Not only are the medical students demanding education, but they're getting more and more interested in potentially training in the field, so the schools and the academic medical centers are very interested in creating addiction medicine fellowship programs. I'm very hopeful that 5-10 years from now, we'll see a vast array of addiction medicine fellowship programs where there's a program at every single medical school.