Check out the American Board of Family Medicine’s (ABFM) latest research below and in our research library, or follow us on LinkedIn where we regularly highlight research relevant to family medicine. ABFM conducts research devoted to creating, evaluating, and maintaining cutting edge certification methods and advancing the scientific basis of family medicine. The ABFM studies listed below offer important findings that can inform policy and practice for the betterment of family medicine, including social determinants of health, how the timing of certification stage completion or knowledge self-assessment engagement affects outcomes, and AI/ML research in primary care.

We also extend our congratulations to Annie Koempel, a valued member of ABFM’s research team, for receiving this year’s best paper award from the Family Practice journal, for her paper, “I consider myself to be a leader”: a qualitative exploration of early career women family physicians’ intentions to assume a leadership role.

Achieving Health System Goals

Factors Associated with Documenting Social Determinants of Health in Electronic Health Records by Family Physicians

Lifetime Impact of the Gender Wage Gap in Family Medicine

Rural and Urban Differences in Family Physician Burnout Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Relationships of Educational Debt With Hours Worked and Burnout Symptoms Among Early-Career Family Physicians

Education and Training

Do Residency Signals Actually Signal Intent? Insights from the 2024 Family Medicine National Resident Survey (Policy Brief)

Impact of Training Length on Scope of Practice Among Residency Graduates: A Report From the Length of Training Pilot Study

Milestones Progression of International Medical Graduates in Family Medicine

The Impact of Length of Training on Clinical Preparedness Among New Graduates: A Report From the Length of Training Pilot Study in Family Medicine

Family Medicine Certification

Blueprinting the Future: Automatic Item Categorisation using Hierarchical Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Classifiers

Developing Content Domain Weights for the 2025 Family Medicine Certification Scale

Knowledge Self-Assessment Engagement and Family Medicine Board Examination Outcomes

Timing of Certification Stage Completion Associated with Subsequent Certification Exam Outcomes among Board-Certified Family Physicians

Leveraging Large Language Models to Advance Certification, Physician Learning, and Diagnostic Excellence

Reclaiming Medical Professionalism In An Era Of Corporate Healthcare

Role of Primary Care

Data Transformation to Advance AI/ML Research and Implementation in Primary Care

Natural Language Processing Improves Reliable Identification of COVID-19 Compared to Diagnostic Codes Alone

Primary care screening for sexually transmitted infections in the United States from 2019 to 2021

Shifting Patterns of Vaccine Delivery Before and After COVID-19: The Declining Role of Primary Care

Validating 8 Area-Based Measures of Social Risk for Predicting Health and Mortality

What Family Physicians Do

An Intersectional Analysis of Social Deprivation and Patient Characteristics on Nirmatrelvir-Ritonavir for Treatment of COVID-19 in U.S. Primary Care Practices, 2021 to 2023

The impact of COVID-19 on Cervical Cancer Screening Rates in Primary Care

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Vaccinations in United States Primary Care Practices