The Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) aims to set forth a vision for medical professionalism in the 21st century and to promote that vision through research and policy initiatives. Four key values underlie our vision of medical professionalism:

• Altruism and Commitment to Patients’ Interests. As changing market forces continue to confront the medical profession, physicians are increasingly challenged to maintain an unwavering commitment to their patients.
• Physician Self-Regulation. Group pressures not to report a colleague or indifference to the performance of others might lead doctors to ignore a colleague’s ineptitude or malfeasance, compromising patients’ health and safety.
• Maintenance of Technical Competence. The pace of innovation in medicine is unprecedented. Absent a commitment to life-long learning, the knowledge base of the best trained physician will soon be outmoded and fall short of best medical practice.
• Civic Engagement. Physicians should enlarge the scope of their concerns from the well-being of the individual patient to a concern for the welfare of all patients. They must make their voices heard by communicating their knowledge to the public.

To ensure that these values will remain at the heart of the medical profession, IMAP is engaged in the following programs and initiatives:

The Challenge of Physician-Industry Relationships
Exploring the relationship of physicians to the health care industry remains a core IMAP activity. Web resources resulting from this activity include our Conflict of Interest Policy Database, our Online Curriculum and Best Practices Toolkits for managing conflicts of interest.

American Legacy Foundation/IMAP Conference
The American Legacy Foundation and IMAP convened a joint conference to evaluate the relationship between medicine and industry across four fields: tobacco, food, alcohol and drugs.

Survey on Medical Professionalism
IMAP has funded a series of surveys by the Mongan Institute for Health Policy (Harvard) to measure physicians’ attitudes and practices.

Physician Advocacy Program
IMAP seeks to make advocacy a core value of the medical profession by developing a cadre of advocates with expertise in achieving policy change at the local, state, and national level.

The China-US Center on Medical Professionalism 
The China-US Center supports research, conducts faculty and student seminars, and works to make the concept of professionalism relevant to medical practice in China.

Medical Professionalism and National Security
IMAP convened a conference to explore what physicians had done and not done about the maltreatment of detainees in security detention facilities and to consider strategies for prevent future abuses.

ABIMF/IMAP Task Force on Managing Health Care Resources
The ABIM Foundation and IMAP have established a task force to consider how to best engage physicians in managing health care resources.

IMAP/RWJ Project on Medical Professionalism in the New Information Age
Medical Professionalism in the Information Age, a collection of essays, will be published September 2010 by the Rutgers University Press.