21st National Conference Roundtables: Mission-Oriented Innovations in Teaching Physicians – The Residency-Based Patient Centered Medical Home, Medicaid HMO and Federally Qualified Health Center

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

The Twenty-first National Conference on Primary Health Care Access will feature initiatives in several states, including a series of roundtables relating to the State of California. (See: 21st National Conference on Primary Health Care Access April 12-15, 2010 in Kaua’i.) One of these will explore “mission-oriented” residency linkages with innovative models of “health care delivery”.

Over the years, the National Conferences have highlighted various innovations in physician residency training in settings that both promote primary health care access for underserved populations and teach them how to provide care to such populations in ways that are culturally sensitive and cost-effective.

Yet, even though such strategic initiatives can be demonstrated as successful, they tend to be financed by disparate revenue streams and may be simultaneously subject to conflicting regulations. Even if one imagines that the follow-up to any federal health care legislation that should pass might prove to be a positive factor for such initiatives, nothing is presently certain.

This roundtable will discuss several innovations that held great promise, some of which are unambiguously successful and some of which are less so.

Doctor Jamie Osborn, director of the Loma Linda University family medicine residency program, will update the successful rural-based residency program in the Central Valley town of Hanford. She will relate her residency program’s transformative experiences with the Patient Centered Medical Home, which she believes has demonstrated its capacity to provide “whole person care”.

Doctor Osborn will begin a discussion of the positive and negative issues relating to the Community Health Center and Medicaid Health Maintenance Organization models of primary health care delivery. She will be joined by Doctors Charles Vega and Ana Bejinez-Eastman.

Doctor Vega’s residency program at UC Irvine has one of the longest track records of any physician training program located in a federally qualified health center, this one located in the center of Santa Ana, one of California’s largest Latino communities. An extensive discussion of Dr Vega’s outreach program may be accessed at: University of California Irvine’s Family Medicine Residency Program: Outreach to Orange County’s Latino Community.