Meeting Recap, Advocacy Event Friday

We had an excellent meeting on Monday, with a panel of four residents from ETSU's Johnson City Family Medicine program. Each resident is considering entering a different area of Family Medicine and had lots of good information and advice to share. Dr. Connie Stoots is considering rural ER, Dr. Rohini Nathan is planning on doing family practice with OB, Dr. Elizabeth Gordon will go on to a sports medicine fellowship, and Dr. Morgan McClain was interested in hospitalist medicine but now may be considering other options. They all stressed versatility and flexibility as reasons why they chose Family Medicine.

In addition to explaining their decisions to pursue Family Medicine, the residents discussed some of the questions we had about residency, opportunities after residency, and the future of the field.
A brief summary:

• The Johnson City residency program is three years and includes a night float program during the 2nd and 3rd years
• Fellowship opportunities after residency include Obstetrics (lower malpractice insurance than an Ob/Gyn), Sports Medicine, ER, Palliative Care, Handicapped Medicine, and Geriatrics
• A new concept in Family Medicine is the Patient Centered Medical Home, in which the primary care physician is the center of all care for a patient. The PCP takes care of all basic medical care plus referrals for specialists, social services, and pychiatric care. This concept is already in effect in many other countries.
• Some other possibilities in the works include new reimbursement strategies, including physicians contracting with companies to provide care for employees. Instead of the company paying a certain amount of insurance per employee, the company would pay the contracted physician a fee per employee per month. Theoretically this solution is economically beneficial to both the company and physician.

Advocacy Event!
On Friday, a few of the FMIG officers and some other students will be participating in a conference call with Senator Bob Corker's Legislative Assistant on Healthcare. We will convey to her the perspective of medical students in hopes that Senator Corker will keep us in mind when he is making decisions! If you have any opinions you'd like to express or questions you'd like to ask, please let us know so we can bring them up during the call.