Effectiveness of a program director for osteopathic medical education to support osteopathic recognition at a training site with multiple programs.

Context: With the advent of the Single Accreditation System (SAS) within the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), few programs have achieved Osteopathic Recognition (OR) status to date. OR is an accreditation that graduate medical education (GME) programs can achieve to distinctly acknowledge the additional focus on osteopathic training. There is an effort by national osteopathic organizations to determine barriers for programs to achieve OR and what innovative methods might help overcome them. In identifying its own barriers, a central Ohio hospital created a unique Program Director for Osteopathic Medical Education (PDOME) role to assist its 10 programs in achieving OR.

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to determine the effect that a PDOME role has through measures of the numbers of programs achieving OR and standards met, as well as the perceived 'helpfulness' of the role based on surveys of program leadership.

Methods: Upon initiation of the PDOME in July 2021, the PDOME assessed applications, citations, and curriculums of the 10 hospital programs with varied OR status to help determine curricular goals. Additional osteopathic activities, evaluation tools and faculty development were subsequently offered based on this information and needs assessments of the programs. A survey was sent to all programs at intervals of 12 and 18 months after role inception to be utilized as process improvement. Comparisons were made between surveys, as well as between the total number of programs with continued OR status and the total OR requirements achieved before and after PDOME. A chi-square test (or Fisher's exact test when the 'n' was too small) was utilized for significance, and the p value was set at 0.05.

Results: After the PDOME, there was a significant increase in the number of OR standards met across programs (p<0.001). Although not significant, the number of programs achieving continued OR increased from 4 to 8 (p=0.168). Due to many positive responses in both surveys, there was no significance between surveys in the "helpfulness" of PDOME; however, there was a significant increase in the number of respondents from 13/67 (or 19.4 %) to 32/67 (or 47.8 %) (p<0.001), indicating increased engagement among respondents.

Conclusions: This study suggests that a PDOME role in medical education may be well received and may assist GME programs in achieving OR. Implementation of a similar role elsewhere could help programs overcome barriers and stir growth in OR programs nationwide.