Speakers

President, American Board of Family Medicine

Warren Newton, MD MPH serves as President and CEO of ABFM. Prior to coming to ABFM, he practiced as a personal physician for 32 years in an FQHC, Health Department and an academic practice; he also started the first hospitalist service at UNC in 1997 and has led large scale practice and educational transformation at the local, regional and statewide levels. ABFM is redesigning every aspect of its certification portfolio, including the Family Medicine Certification Longitudinal Assessment (FMCLA), a new National Journal Club, Knowledge Self Assessments, Performance Improvement activities and a major revision of its Professionalism Guidelines. The ABFM launched the Center for Professionalism and Value in Health in July 2019 in Washington, DC, runs the PRIME registry, and conducts research in the ecology of family medicine, Measures that Matter in Primary Care and other policy areas critical to the future of family medicine and primary care. Family Medicine Residency Redesign is also a major focus now, with implementation of CBME across 772+ residencies as of July1, 2023 as is supporting a specialty wide initiative to build research capacity. A recovering Residency Director, Chair, Chief Academic Officer and NC AHEC Director, he clearly gets bored very easily and relishes working with colleagues and friends in family medicine.

Dr. Newton served as the William B. Aycock Professor and Chair of UNC Family Medicine (1999-2016), UNC School of Medicine Chief Academic Officer (2008-2013), and Vice Dean and Director of North Carolina AHEC (2013-2018). He has led clinical practice and educational transformation at the practice, region and state levels and in both undergraduate and graduate medical education. As Family Medicine Chair and AHEC Director, he was responsible for over 30 residency programs, and founded and led the I3 collaborative of almost 30 primary care residencies in practice transformation from 2006-2018. He led the Improving Performance in Practice initiative (later AHEC practice support) which expanded to help care transformation to over 1400 primary care practices. As Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, he helped develop the 1115 Medicaid waiver application and developed a plan for dramatically increasing family medicine, general surgery and psychiatry residencies across the state; this plan has been partially implemented. Dr. Newton’s scholarship has focused on the organization and effectiveness of health care; he has over 180 peer reviewed publications, including over 80 published with students and residents. He has been principal investigator on grants totaling more than $50,000,000. From 2012 to 2017, he served on the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina State Health Plan.

Dr. Newton graduated from Yale University with a double major in biology and history in 1980 and Northwestern University Medical School in 1984. After residency and chief residency in family medicine at the University of North Carolina, he completed the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and an MPH at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. In 2012-13, he was selected as a Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) Bishop Fellow, during which he also completed the American Council of Education Fellows program.