Kinnear named UC's second Macy Faculty Scholar in three years

“I am extremely excited! We have an opportunity to innovate in a way that could help our residents and our program. I am also incredibly grateful to my mentors ​and our education team for all of their help and support,” Kinnear says.

The two-year award will allow Kinnear to spend at least 50% of his time beginning Sept. 1 pursuing an educational innovation project titled “Piloting Competency-Based Time-Variable Training in Internal Medicine” and other opportunities to enhance his career as an educator. The project will follow a subset of internal medicine residents as they progress through residency based on their performance and abilities, not how long they have trained. "Dr. Eric Warm (Richard W. & Sue P. Vilter Professor of Medicine and director of the Internal Medicine Training Program) has led our team over the last eight years to build an assessment program that can defensibly determine when a resident is ready to progress. I believe this type of model, where we focus on competence and not time-in-training, is the future of graduate medical education,” Kinnear says.

“We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Benjamin Kinnear to our newest class of Macy Faculty Scholars,” says Holly Humphrey, MD, president of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. “We look forward to seeing how his work piloting and assessing competency-based time-variable training advances physician education.”

Kinnear is an internal medicine and pediatrics hospitalist physician at Cincinnati Children’s and University of Cincinnati Medical Center. He completed his med-peds residency training at UC and Cincinnati Children’s and served as chief resident in 2014.

Kinnear is the associate program director for the UC Med-Peds residency program, and associate program director for the UC Internal Medicine residency program’s Medical Education Pathway. He is part of both residencies’ core education teams, with a focus on programmatic learner assessment, clinical competency committees and validity arguments in competency-based medical education. Kinnear completed his Master of Medical Education in 2018, and is one of the first faculty members to participate in the Education Research Scholars Program at Cincinnati Children’s.

Featured image of congratulatory message/Photo by Daniel Schumacher, MD, PhD.