The Nonlinear Library EA - High Impact Medicine - Impact Survey Results and Marginal Funding by High Impact Medicine
Nov 21, 2023
06:33
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: High Impact Medicine - Impact Survey Results and Marginal Funding, published by High Impact Medicine on November 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Introduction
As part of the Marginal Funding Week, we want to give a brief update on High Impact Medicine, describing which projects marginal funding is likely to be spent on.
High Impact Medicine (Hi-Med) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to inspiring and empowering medical students and doctors to make impact-driven decisions in their careers and giving.
Theory of Change
This is an overview of our activities, our current definition of positive impact, our target audience and the outcomes we monitor.
The main assumptions behind our theory of change are:
Target group-specific interventions can improve altruistic behaviour change beyond broad outreach: Interventions customised to professional groups account for background-specific needs, abilities, and goals.
Professional peers can be potent facilitators of altruistic behaviour: Role models are an important trigger for altruistic behaviour change. Change is more likely when someone is "like me", i.e. belongs to a relevant peer group.
Medical doctors are a well-suited target group for altruistic impact considerations: They are often strongly altruistically motivated, exceptionally skilled, and scientifically minded, and they often have significant career capital and high incomes.
Proof of concept: Past interventions and their validation
We conducted various programmes, interacting with > 500 medical doctors and students over the past two years. The full 2023 Impact Survey Executive Summary can be found here. The evaluation of our inaugural introductory fellowship cohort has been published in an academic peer-reviewed journal.
Bioethicist Benjamin Krohmal recently ran an elective course for medical students at Georgetown University School of Medicine in the US, "Beneficence & Beyond: How to do the most good with your medical career", that was inspired and informed by our introductory fellowship. Our monitoring and evaluation team is currently helping to assess the results, and we are in conversations with other universities to run similar programmes.
What we learned
There is substantial interest in the medical community to learn more about doing the most good: We also got preliminary confirmation that the medical background of the High Impact Medicine team meant that we were able to form genuine and meaningful connections with our members, which in turn increased the tractability of our efforts.
It's likely that a mix of interventions that matters: All individuals for whom Hi-Med has facilitated career changes have participated in both the introductory fellowship and 1:1 conversations. 1:1 conversations seemed to be particularly important in influencing them to make these career and giving decisions.
We have seen the most positive impactful changes in individuals with high scores in altruistic motivation & career capital: This was an observation from our most successful case studies.
Time investments to attain giving pledges can be extremely low: Charismatic individuals can initiate someone strongly considering a donation pledge in a single 1-1.
Impact attribution is challenging: Individuals engage in multiple interventions, complicating evaluations.
Reliance on volunteers is unsustainable: Operationally, our rapid community growth and reliance on contractors / volunteers strained our organisational capacity.
Looking forward
Based on our evaluation of past and current programmes, we plan to iterate in the following way
Select for and attract more promising individuals (e.g. by building external credibility) and provide them with timely and individualised support (e.g. more 1:1 calls, a career fellowship cohort starting every other month, biosecurity career change ...
Introduction
As part of the Marginal Funding Week, we want to give a brief update on High Impact Medicine, describing which projects marginal funding is likely to be spent on.
High Impact Medicine (Hi-Med) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to inspiring and empowering medical students and doctors to make impact-driven decisions in their careers and giving.
Theory of Change
This is an overview of our activities, our current definition of positive impact, our target audience and the outcomes we monitor.
The main assumptions behind our theory of change are:
Target group-specific interventions can improve altruistic behaviour change beyond broad outreach: Interventions customised to professional groups account for background-specific needs, abilities, and goals.
Professional peers can be potent facilitators of altruistic behaviour: Role models are an important trigger for altruistic behaviour change. Change is more likely when someone is "like me", i.e. belongs to a relevant peer group.
Medical doctors are a well-suited target group for altruistic impact considerations: They are often strongly altruistically motivated, exceptionally skilled, and scientifically minded, and they often have significant career capital and high incomes.
Proof of concept: Past interventions and their validation
We conducted various programmes, interacting with > 500 medical doctors and students over the past two years. The full 2023 Impact Survey Executive Summary can be found here. The evaluation of our inaugural introductory fellowship cohort has been published in an academic peer-reviewed journal.
Bioethicist Benjamin Krohmal recently ran an elective course for medical students at Georgetown University School of Medicine in the US, "Beneficence & Beyond: How to do the most good with your medical career", that was inspired and informed by our introductory fellowship. Our monitoring and evaluation team is currently helping to assess the results, and we are in conversations with other universities to run similar programmes.
What we learned
There is substantial interest in the medical community to learn more about doing the most good: We also got preliminary confirmation that the medical background of the High Impact Medicine team meant that we were able to form genuine and meaningful connections with our members, which in turn increased the tractability of our efforts.
It's likely that a mix of interventions that matters: All individuals for whom Hi-Med has facilitated career changes have participated in both the introductory fellowship and 1:1 conversations. 1:1 conversations seemed to be particularly important in influencing them to make these career and giving decisions.
We have seen the most positive impactful changes in individuals with high scores in altruistic motivation & career capital: This was an observation from our most successful case studies.
Time investments to attain giving pledges can be extremely low: Charismatic individuals can initiate someone strongly considering a donation pledge in a single 1-1.
Impact attribution is challenging: Individuals engage in multiple interventions, complicating evaluations.
Reliance on volunteers is unsustainable: Operationally, our rapid community growth and reliance on contractors / volunteers strained our organisational capacity.
Looking forward
Based on our evaluation of past and current programmes, we plan to iterate in the following way
Select for and attract more promising individuals (e.g. by building external credibility) and provide them with timely and individualised support (e.g. more 1:1 calls, a career fellowship cohort starting every other month, biosecurity career change ...