Sacred Heart/Temple University FMRP

15 years ago
Bill Burnett
20 minutes

Last Updated on April 16, 2022 by Lee Burnett, DO, FAAFP

NATIONAL PROJECT ON THE COMMUNITY IMPACT
OF FAMILY MEDICINE RESIDENCY PROGRAMS
Sacred Heart Hospital/Temple University
Family Medicine Residency Program:
A Report
(First draft)
One of the most important policy issues facing the country as a whole and, locally, the Lehigh Valley and the rural counties that comprise Northeast Pennsylvania, is the need to find better ways to assure that the area’s population has access to health care that is of high quality and is affordable.
A common complaint is that the health care system is fragmented, with many health care facilities and personnel offering very specialized services, often at high cost even to patients with medical insurance.  However, educational systems – including the Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency program – exist for training physicians that can provide health care comprehensively and that can assure continuity in the care provided.
Forty years ago the nation, through a partnership of the medical professions and the federal and state governments, established the family physician medical specialty and created three-year accredited residency programs accredited to train them.  Family physicians, with general internists and general pediatricians, are the physicians who provide primary health care in the United States. Most persons who have a personal physician have one from these primary care specialties.
An important public policy objective is to encourage everyone to establish a “medical home”, in which all of a person’s medical information can be cared for by a single medical entity, including direct patient care, providing or obtaining diagnostic testing, referral to sub-specialists when needed, coordination of pharmaceutical prescriptions, and management of chronic conditions.
Of the various physician specialties, family physicians are the most proportionately distributed to where the country’s population lives. Family physicians, unlike referral specialists, practice in most neighborhoods and communities. Often the practices of one or more family physicians are among the major employers in a neighborhood.
The accredited entities that train family physicians are called family medicine residency programs. A physician who is training to become a board-certified family physician is called a family medicine resident.
The Sacred Heart Hospital/Temple University Family Medicine Residency Program
The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine program was established in 1972, and has graduated 157 family physicians, 23 of whom are practicing in the Lehigh Valley and surrounding communities. Of these graduates, 17 utilize the Sacred Heart Hospital when hospitalization of their patients is required, which contributes to the financial health of this important community institution. Each year the program graduates six new family physicians.
Although helping a patient maintain good health is a principal goal of all family physicians (and primary care physicians generally), possibly the majority of patients that seek care are concerned with acute or chronic illness.   Family physicians are trained to diagnose and actively manage the range of medical problems that a person or family may encounter in their lifetime.
Unlike other primary care physician specialties, family physicians are trained to provide care for children and adolescents, and adult men and women, including prenatal and maternity services.
For example, Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residents provide obstetrical, gynecological and pediatric care, as well as adult and geriatric care. Additionally, all residents and faculty and all graduates of the Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency program are trained to diagnose and treat all of the common chronic conditions, including diabetes, congestive heart failure and coronary artery disease, asthma and COPD, hypertension, arthritis and high cholesterol, among others.  They do so as the first contact physician, primary managing physician, and perhaps most important of all, coordinator of care, working with referral cardiologists and surgical specialists.
Such chronic diseases are best treated when detected early, and family physicians are extensively trained in determining which of their patients either show signs of these problems or are at risk for them. A family medicine resident or board-certified family physician will be able to obtain the diagnostic tests and, whenever medically appropriate, specialty procedures that a patient needs.
With proper care, most persons whose medical problems have advanced to a stage needing surgery or a highly specialized medical intervention, can still achieve a satisfactory lifestyle after their surgery or specialized treatment.  A family physician, working in collaboration with the surgeons or specialists to whom the patient has been referred, will provide ongoing care afterwards to maximize a person’s health and well-being.
The Sigal Center for Family Medicine
A distinctive feature of the training provided to Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residents is that, in addition to the hospital inpatient rotations that constitute the site of learning for most physician specialties, each family medicine resident trains in a family medicine center (the Sigal Center for Family Medicine), which provides care in an outpatient setting like a family doctor’s office.
Designed to give the family medicine resident a three-year experience in providing a full range of medical and health maintenance services to the same group of patients, the Sigal Center for Family Medicine at 450 Chew in Allentown, is staffed by residents, their supervising physicians, and other health professionals.
The Sigal Center for Family Medicine is specifically designed to be the medical home for its enrolled patients, utilizing a sophisticated medical record system to assure that their patients receive a full range of medical services.
Sigal Center for Family Medicine Women’s Health Services
The women’s health services provided by the Sigal Center for Family Medicine include pelvic exams, preconception counseling and comprehensive, family-centered maternity care.
The family medicine residency women’s health program arranges for mammography and other diagnostic services, such as osteoporosis screening, for its patients. The program routinely provides such services as PAP smears, common gynecological procedures, birth control advice, programs for adolescents, weight loss programs and mental health counseling within the Sigal Center for Family Medicine.
The Sacred Heart Hospital Inpatient Family Medicine Service
Beyond the ambulatory care provided in the Sigal Center for Family Medicine, the family medicine residency program maintains an inpatient service within Sacred Heart Hospital.  In these settings family medicine residents and faculty, in collaboration with colleagues in surgical and referral specialties, take care of family medicine center patients who have to be hospitalized.
Sacred Heart Hospital’s inpatient family medicine residency service encompasses internal medicine, pediatrics, and gynecology.  The residency program staffs intensive care units and provides post-surgical care. In the hospital’s Labor and Delivery suites, the family medicine program provides maternity services for its family medicine center patients and post-partum maternity care.
Sacred Heart Family Medicine Residency School Initiatives
The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency program provides extensive health services to students of area public and parochial schools.  It contracts with the Allentown City School District for such services as pre-employment physicals for high school students entering the job market and provides lectures in elementary and secondary school classrooms to discourage smoking.
The family medicine residency sports medicine program also serves the school athletics programs and competitive sports teams, including those of William Allen High School Larry E. Dieruff High School and Allentown Central Catholic High School in Allentown.
Sigal Center for Family Medicine Cares for a Community’s Most Vulnerable
The mission of the Sacred Heart HealthCare System states its commitment “to provide health care and wellness, from conception to natural death, through quality services and programs based on the Catholic ethical and religious directives.” This commitment is evidenced through the patient population served by its family medicine residency program.
The Sigal Center for Family Medicine is a point of access to many of the community’s most vulnerable populations – those on public assistance, the medically uninsured, the elderly and the disabled.  Over 40% of the 18,200 patient visits receive public assistance through Pennsylvania’s Medicaid program, ten percent are uninsured or indigent patients, and an additional 40%, mostly elderly persons, are enrolled in the Medicare program.
The remaining ten percent of the Sigal Center for Family Medicine  patients include working class families covered by the private sector health insurance plans. Yet, even privately insured patients may find it difficult to negotiate the health care system without such advocates for their health care as they might obtain in their medical home.
Because the costs of health care have become increasingly difficult for many individuals and families to manage, persons in these vulnerable categories of patients often defer necessary health services until they become acutely ill.  The community at large benefits if such persons are encouraged to establish a medical home to assure quality health care on an ongoing basis.
The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine program works with the hospital billing office and social work staff to help the uninsured in obtaining health care financial assistance for which they may be eligible.
Sacred Heart Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program’s Community-oriented Primary Care
The Sacred Heart family medicine residency program contracts to provide medical services to KidsPeace, the 125 year old child treatment organization, centered in Schwenksville that is now one the nation’s leading facilities for treating children in crisis.
It also cares for the clients served by the Allentown Rescue Mission, a century old agency providing services to the homeless, both at the Sigal Center and at the mission itself.
Working with such community partners as the Area Council on the Aging, the visiting nurses association, parish nurses, and schools, the Sacred Heart family medicine residency provides health education lectures in the community, and participates in health fairs at the Sigal Center and in parish sites.  Family medicine residents learn about the experiences of the most vulnerable by participating in soup kitchens and other services for those in the community most in need.
Sigal Center for Family Medicine’s Services for the Elderly
The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency provides an extensive range of services for elderly population. Ongoing primary preventive, chronic and acute care is provided to maintain the health and well-being of the Sigal Center for Family Medicine’s elderly patients.
In addition to the primary care and diagnostic services provided at the family medicine center and the family medicine residency’s inpatient services at Sacred Heart Hospital, the residency program continues to serve its patients requiring nursing home or end of life care.
This includes home visits of homebound elderly, and clinical services to area nursing homes, both for skilled-nursing patients and those patients needing long-term custodial care. Hospice care is provided both as part of nursing home hospice and through home visits.
Chronic Disease Management and Coordination of Specialty Referrals
Additionally, the program provides ongoing care to persons with such chronic conditions as diabetes, cardiovascular and neurological diseases, severe asthma and behavioral disorders.  With ongoing, continuous care, most of these patients can be kept out of hospital emergency rooms, one of the most costly ways of providing health services.  In the case of public assistance or uninsured patients, the financial impact of the community of avoidable emergency room use can be very high.
One of the functions of family medicine residency programs is to help patients determine when they need diagnostic tests or to be seen by sub-specialists.  The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency program has mechanisms in place to help most patients obtain the services they need.  In the case of public assistance patients, these mechanisms prove invaluable, since many sub-specialists often do not offer their services to persons who do not have private sector health insurance.
Summary
The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency is achieving its goal of promoting access to primary health care, and to comprehensive, continuous health care to Allentown and the surrounding communities of the Lehigh Valley.
Helping fulfill the education and service missions of the Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency, the family physicians the family medicine residency program trains and the patient care services the residency program provides, contribute to the improvement of the community’s health.

NATIONAL PROJECT ON THE COMMUNITY IMPACT

OF FAMILY MEDICINE RESIDENCY PROGRAMS

Sacred Heart Hospital/Temple University

Family Medicine Residency Program:

A Report

(First draft)

One of the most important policy issues facing the country as a whole and, locally, the Lehigh Valley and the rural counties that comprise Northeast Pennsylvania, is the need to find better ways to assure that the area’s population has access to health care that is of high quality and is affordable.

A common complaint is that the health care system is fragmented, with many health care facilities and personnel offering very specialized services, often at high cost even to patients with medical insurance.  However, educational systems – including the Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency program – exist for training physicians that can provide health care comprehensively and that can assure continuity in the care provided.

Forty years ago the nation, through a partnership of the medical professions and the federal and state governments, established the family physician medical specialty and created three-year accredited residency programs accredited to train them.  Family physicians, with general internists and general pediatricians, are the physicians who provide primary health care in the United States. Most persons who have a personal physician have one from these primary care specialties.

An important public policy objective is to encourage everyone to establish a “medical home”, in which all of a person’s medical information can be cared for by a single medical entity, including direct patient care, providing or obtaining diagnostic testing, referral to sub-specialists when needed, coordination of pharmaceutical prescriptions, and management of chronic conditions.

Of the various physician specialties, family physicians are the most proportionately distributed to where the country’s population lives. Family physicians, unlike referral specialists, practice in most neighborhoods and communities. Often the practices of one or more family physicians are among the major employers in a neighborhood.

The accredited entities that train family physicians are called family medicine residency programs. A physician who is training to become a board-certified family physician is called a family medicine resident.

The Sacred Heart Hospital/Temple University Family Medicine Residency Program

The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine program was established in 1972, and has graduated 157 family physicians, 23 of whom are practicing in the Lehigh Valley and surrounding communities. Of these graduates, 17 utilize the Sacred Heart Hospital when hospitalization of their patients is required, which contributes to the financial health of this important community institution. Each year the program graduates six new family physicians.

Although helping a patient maintain good health is a principal goal of all family physicians (and primary care physicians generally), possibly the majority of patients that seek care are concerned with acute or chronic illness.   Family physicians are trained to diagnose and actively manage the range of medical problems that a person or family may encounter in their lifetime.

Unlike other primary care physician specialties, family physicians are trained to provide care for children and adolescents, and adult men and women, including prenatal and maternity services.

For example, Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residents provide obstetrical, gynecological and pediatric care, as well as adult and geriatric care. Additionally, all residents and faculty and all graduates of the Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency program are trained to diagnose and treat all of the common chronic conditions, including diabetes, congestive heart failure and coronary artery disease, asthma and COPD, hypertension, arthritis and high cholesterol, among others.  They do so as the first contact physician, primary managing physician, and perhaps most important of all, coordinator of care, working with referral cardiologists and surgical specialists.

Such chronic diseases are best treated when detected early, and family physicians are extensively trained in determining which of their patients either show signs of these problems or are at risk for them. A family medicine resident or board-certified family physician will be able to obtain the diagnostic tests and, whenever medically appropriate, specialty procedures that a patient needs.

With proper care, most persons whose medical problems have advanced to a stage needing surgery or a highly specialized medical intervention, can still achieve a satisfactory lifestyle after their surgery or specialized treatment.  A family physician, working in collaboration with the surgeons or specialists to whom the patient has been referred, will provide ongoing care afterwards to maximize a person’s health and well-being.

The Sigal Center for Family Medicine

A distinctive feature of the training provided to Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residents is that, in addition to the hospital inpatient rotations that constitute the site of learning for most physician specialties, each family medicine resident trains in a family medicine center (the Sigal Center for Family Medicine), which provides care in an outpatient setting like a family doctor’s office.

Designed to give the family medicine resident a three-year experience in providing a full range of medical and health maintenance services to the same group of patients, the Sigal Center for Family Medicine at 450 Chew in Allentown, is staffed by residents, their supervising physicians, and other health professionals.

The Sigal Center for Family Medicine is specifically designed to be the medical home for its enrolled patients, utilizing a sophisticated medical record system to assure that their patients receive a full range of medical services.

Sigal Center for Family Medicine Women’s Health Services

The women’s health services provided by the Sigal Center for Family Medicine include pelvic exams, preconception counseling and comprehensive, family-centered maternity care.

The family medicine residency women’s health program arranges for mammography and other diagnostic services, such as osteoporosis screening, for its patients. The program routinely provides such services as PAP smears, common gynecological procedures, birth control advice, programs for adolescents, weight loss programs and mental health counseling within the Sigal Center for Family Medicine.

The Sacred Heart Hospital Inpatient Family Medicine Service

Beyond the ambulatory care provided in the Sigal Center for Family Medicine, the family medicine residency program maintains an inpatient service within Sacred Heart Hospital.  In these settings family medicine residents and faculty, in collaboration with colleagues in surgical and referral specialties, take care of family medicine center patients who have to be hospitalized.

Sacred Heart Hospital’s inpatient family medicine residency service encompasses internal medicine, pediatrics, and gynecology.  The residency program staffs intensive care units and provides post-surgical care. In the hospital’s Labor and Delivery suites, the family medicine program provides maternity services for its family medicine center patients and post-partum maternity care.

Sacred Heart Family Medicine Residency School Initiatives

The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency program provides extensive health services to students of area public and parochial schools.  It contracts with the Allentown City School District for such services as pre-employment physicals for high school students entering the job market and provides lectures in elementary and secondary school classrooms to discourage smoking.

The family medicine residency sports medicine program also serves the school athletics programs and competitive sports teams, including those of William Allen High School Larry E. Dieruff High School and Allentown Central Catholic High School in Allentown.

Sigal Center for Family Medicine Cares for a Community’s Most Vulnerable

The mission of the Sacred Heart HealthCare System states its commitment “to provide health care and wellness, from conception to natural death, through quality services and programs based on the Catholic ethical and religious directives.” This commitment is evidenced through the patient population served by its family medicine residency program.

The Sigal Center for Family Medicine is a point of access to many of the community’s most vulnerable populations – those on public assistance, the medically uninsured, the elderly and the disabled.  Over 40% of the 18,200 patient visits receive public assistance through Pennsylvania’s Medicaid program, ten percent are uninsured or indigent patients, and an additional 40%, mostly elderly persons, are enrolled in the Medicare program.

The remaining ten percent of the Sigal Center for Family Medicine  patients include working class families covered by the private sector health insurance plans. Yet, even privately insured patients may find it difficult to negotiate the health care system without such advocates for their health care as they might obtain in their medical home.

Because the costs of health care have become increasingly difficult for many individuals and families to manage, persons in these vulnerable categories of patients often defer necessary health services until they become acutely ill.  The community at large benefits if such persons are encouraged to establish a medical home to assure quality health care on an ongoing basis.

The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine program works with the hospital billing office and social work staff to help the uninsured in obtaining health care financial assistance for which they may be eligible.

Sacred Heart Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program’s Community-oriented Primary Care

The Sacred Heart family medicine residency program contracts to provide medical services to KidsPeace, the 125 year old child treatment organization, centered in Schwenksville that is now one the nation’s leading facilities for treating children in crisis.

It also cares for the clients served by the Allentown Rescue Mission, a century old agency providing services to the homeless, both at the Sigal Center and at the mission itself.

Working with such community partners as the Area Council on the Aging, the visiting nurses association, parish nurses, and schools, the Sacred Heart family medicine residency provides health education lectures in the community, and participates in health fairs at the Sigal Center and in parish sites.  Family medicine residents learn about the experiences of the most vulnerable by participating in soup kitchens and other services for those in the community most in need.

Sigal Center for Family Medicine’s Services for the Elderly

The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency provides an extensive range of services for elderly population. Ongoing primary preventive, chronic and acute care is provided to maintain the health and well-being of the Sigal Center for Family Medicine’s elderly patients.

In addition to the primary care and diagnostic services provided at the family medicine center and the family medicine residency’s inpatient services at Sacred Heart Hospital, the residency program continues to serve its patients requiring nursing home or end of life care.

This includes home visits of homebound elderly, and clinical services to area nursing homes, both for skilled-nursing patients and those patients needing long-term custodial care. Hospice care is provided both as part of nursing home hospice and through home visits.

Chronic Disease Management and Coordination of Specialty Referrals

Additionally, the program provides ongoing care to persons with such chronic conditions as diabetes, cardiovascular and neurological diseases, severe asthma and behavioral disorders.  With ongoing, continuous care, most of these patients can be kept out of hospital emergency rooms, one of the most costly ways of providing health services.  In the case of public assistance or uninsured patients, the financial impact of the community of avoidable emergency room use can be very high.

One of the functions of family medicine residency programs is to help patients determine when they need diagnostic tests or to be seen by sub-specialists.  The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency program has mechanisms in place to help most patients obtain the services they need.  In the case of public assistance patients, these mechanisms prove invaluable, since many sub-specialists often do not offer their services to persons who do not have private sector health insurance.

Summary

The Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency is achieving its goal of promoting access to primary health care, and to comprehensive, continuous health care to Allentown and the surrounding communities of the Lehigh Valley.

Helping fulfill the education and service missions of the Sacred Heart Hospital family medicine residency, the family physicians the family medicine residency program trains and the patient care services the residency program provides, contribute to the improvement of the community’s health.

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