MERGE Annual Conference

8:30 – 9:15: Welcome address

• Kalli Varaklis, MD, MSEd , Principal Investigator for the MERGE Collaborative

Dr. Varaklis will provide attendees a brief overview of the MERGE Collaborative, report on outcomes from the first year of operation, and share the vision for the program for 2024 and beyond.

9:15 – 10:15: Keynote Speaker David Loxterkamp, MD: “Lessons from a Country Doctor”

David Loxterkamp is a family physician from Belfast, Maine, where he has lived since 1984. He was a founding member and medical director of Searsport Family Practice which later became Seaport Community Health Center. This center participated in the National Demonstration Project (2006-2008) and the Maine Patient-Centered Medical Home Pilot (2010-present) and was certified as a Level III Patient-Centered Medical Home by the NCQA. The Seaport Community Health Center has welcomed students and residents to the practice for the past three decades.

David Loxterkamp is the author of “A Measure of My Days” (University Press of New England, 1997) and “What Matters in Medicine” (University of Michigan Press, 2013), and numerous articles in the medical and lay press.

10:30-12:00 Session Block

ROOM A – “Building Blocks of a Good Teacher: Precepting 101” – Session Moderator: Jim Jarvis, MD, Director of Clinical Education, Northern Light Health

• “Everything I Need to Know about Medicine (and teaching it), I learned in Kindergarten”: Dr. Jim Jarvis, Director of Clinical Education, Northern Light Health

o   Dr. Jarvis will share his experience as a preceptor of Family Medicine across the country. His talk will cover practical advice for teaching GME learners and how teaching can improve the quality of care for both patients and physicians.

•       Interactive Activity: Improving Precepting Skills

o   A team of preceptors from Northern Light Health will interact with participants to build communication skills to make teaching impactful and efficient.

ROOM B – “Scholarly Activity in a Rural Setting” – Session Moderator: Annie Derthick, Ph.D., Associate Program Director, CMMC Family Medicine Residency Program

• Practice-based Research for the Rural Clinician – Neil Korsen, MD, Physician-scientist and former rural family physician

o   This session will explore the ways rural clinicians can optimize the work they are already doing to develop a portfolio of scholarly activity. We will identify how to frame everyday questions and projects to turn them into a research project. We will review the infrastructure of the research process including IRB, peer-review, and dissemination pathways and help participants identify how these can be accessible in smaller systems that do not have “research departments.” The goal of this session is that participants will feel excited and more confident about starting a scholarly project when they return to their clinic.

•       Community-Engaged Research – Abigail DeShiffart, Ryan Hibbs, Robert Krulee, and Tyler Nussinow

o   A panel of the inaugural MERGE Interns will discuss their community-based research projects. Interns spent four weeks living in rural communities across the state learning about a variety of different health conditions from a local, population health perspective directly from the people and agencies engaged in the work. They will share how they used the Maine Shared Community Health Needs Assessment and local health data to generate a research question, how they collaborated with community stakeholders to discover the answer to that question and developed a policy brief for leaders in their communities. Please also take time to visit their posters displayed outside the session room during the lunch break.

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Lunch

1:00 PM – 1:45 PM – Plenary Speaker Tonya Bailey-Curry, LCSW – “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for our Rural Spaces”

• Tonya Bailey-Curry, LCSW, serves as the MERGE Collaborative’s DEI consultant and sits on the MERGE executive committee. Ms. Bailey-Curry’s experience in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion leadership includes work with Bates College and Central Maine Medical Center. As a born and raised Mainer, Ms. Bailey-Curry will speak to the importance of DEI initiatives and how they can improve health outcomes in our rural spaces.

1:45 PM – 3:00 PM: Session Block

Room A: “Difficult Conversations with the iGen Learner” 

• Kalli Varaklis, MD, DIO Maine Medical Center, PI for the MERGE Collaborative
• Kristen Sciacca, MD Maine Medical Center 

Research shows that each generation of learners bring different experiences and expectations to the classroom and informal learning spaces. “iGen” learners, or those born between 1995 and 2012, account for many of our new medical residents and inter-professional learners entering healthcare professions. The first part of this session will map out generational expectations and norms and show how they impact the learning environment. The second part will provide a framework for having difficult conversations with the iGen learner. This interactive experience will give participants the opportunity to use research-backed methods to deliver clear communication and instruction in a potentially emotional setting.

Room B: “Preserving the Future of Maine’s Rural Physician Workforce” – Session Moderator: Dr. Thomas Gearan, Program Director, Rural Internal Medicine Maine (RIMM) Track

• Panel Discussion:

  • Dr. Tom Gearan, Associate DIO Maine Medical Center

  • Dr. Ross Isacke, CMO, Franklin Memorial Hospital

  • Dr. Yusuf Ebrahim, RIMM Track Resident, Western Maine Health

Through a panel discussion, experts will provide a current state of Maine’s rural physician workforce, local and state initiatives aimed to address the growing shortage of physicians and exciting new medical education models that will train more of our physicians in rural settings.