The $400,000 DEI Program to Turn Internal Medicine Inside-Out

Following the “racial reckoning” of 2020, numerous medical associations and specialty societies took it upon themselves to delve into the realm of political and racial activism, promoting DEI and radical ideology to the detriment of medical education and, ultimately, patients themselves. This is a phenomenon that Do No Harm has extensively recorded. 

These efforts often manifested in projects intended to rewire the landscape of medicine through trainings and continuing education that pushed the precepts of DEI onto the healthcare system.

Take the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine (AAIM). This is the fourth year that AAIM will be offering its $400,000 grant program, “Building Trust through Diversity, Health Care Equity, Inclusion and Diagnostic Excellence in Internal Medicine Training.”

We don’t have to speculate about whether the grant program is intended to reform medical education in accordance with a radical ideology; AAIM literally says that’s the case. The purpose of the funds, per AAIM, is to “integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into the fabric of internal medicine education and training.”

In fact, the inaugural grant announcement contained this same language. It further noted that “bias and discrimination in health care have slowly but steadily eroded trust in the entire system, including in clinicians directly responsible for care.” (We agree! Although not for the same reasons as AAIM).

The grant program specifically courts applications to develop “training programs that incorporate DEI, and in particular those that employ inter-professional education best practices.”

One previous grant recipient aimed to “expand the curriculum for primary care residents to include education about […] patient mistrust and physician bias.” And to illustrate just how tied this program is with political activism, a 2023 grant recipient received $40,000 for a project titled “Integration of Voter Registration within a Safety-Net Health System to Address Voting as a Social Determinant of Health.”

AAIM even appears to invite applications to develop newfangled methods for racial discrimination, asking for “approaches that foster and support diverse and equitable pathways into medicine and faculty and leadership positions.”

But what makes this program particularly problematic is the fact that AAIM is composed of several organizations that represent not just medical providers or students but the educational decision-makers. These include department chairs of internal medicine at medical schools, fellowship program directors, residency program directors, and more. 

In other words, AAIM represents the standard-setting movers and shakers in internal medicine education. And its focus is to propagate DEI throughout the field of academic internal medicine and in its own words, integrate DEI into internal medicine’s fabric.

Let’s not sugarcoat it: This is a full-fledged ideological assault intended to remake medicine into a new, DEI-centric discipline that prioritizes activism and supports racial discrimination to achieve its “equity” goals.

The physicians of tomorrow should not be ideologues. And AAIM should take its responsibility more seriously and commit to excellence, not “equity.”