Doctor Joseph Scherger to Present 22nd Charles E. Odegaard Lecture at 26th National Conference

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

Joseph E. Scherger, MD, MPH, will present the 22nd Charles E. Odegaard Lecture at the 26th National Conference on Primary Health Care Access.

The National Conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Orange County in Garden Grove, California, April 13-15, 2015.

Doctor Scherger  is Vice President for Primary Care and the Marie E. Pinizzotto, MD Chair of Academic Affairs at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California.

A Fellow of the National Conferences, Doctor Scherger  is a noted authority on utilizing information technology and continuous quality improvement techniques to improve office-based medical practices.

Author of the book Forty Years in Family Medicine, Dr Scherger’s Odegaard Lecture is particularly germane to the 26th National Conference that will be memorializing the late Doctor G. Gayle Stephens, himself an author concerned deeply about the doctor-patient relationship and the jeopardy it faces in a world of “for-profit” medicine.

Doctor Scherger presented the 1993 Stephens Lecture at the Fourth National Conference in Monterey [The Third G. Gayle Stephens Lecture by Joseph E. Scherger, MD, MPH].

Significantly, Dr Scherger’s Third Stephens Lecture followed the First Stephens Lecture by Doctor Stephens himself [Proceedings of the Second National Conference: The First G. Gayle Stephens Lecture by G. Gayle Stephens, MD.] and the Second Stephens Lecture by Doctor Odegaard [The Second G. Gayle Stephens Lecture by Charles E. Odegaard, Ph.D.].

Like Stephens and Scherger, Doctor Odegaard, a historian who served as President of the University of Washington, wrote on the subject of the doctor-patient relationship.in his book, “Dear Doctor”,

A member of the Millis Commission, a national citizen’s commission that served during the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, Odegaard was instrumental in the Millis Commission’s adoption of the concept of the “personal physician”.

Among the outcomes of the Millis Commission’s work were major changes in the structure of postgraduate medical education.

The family medicine specialty and family medicine residency training programs trace their lineage to the Millis and Willard commissions of a half-century ago.