The Harvard Home for Family Medicine builds upon the growing community of HMS family medicine students, residents, and attendings engaged in family medicine education, research, and mentorship opportunities. While most of our more active participants are based within the Harvard system, our Harvard Medical School students often graduate to residencies further afield. In this series, we’re thrilled to spotlight what some of our recent HMS Family Medicine students have gone on to achieve. Name:

What influences Harvard Medical School (HMS) students to pursue a career in primary care? In our study, we surveyed HMS graduates from 1980 to 2016 who matched into internal medicine, family medicine, and pediatrics residencies to dig deep into this question. We learned that three out of four students who started HMS with an interest in primary care stuck with their goal. Over the 37 years, the ...

By Steven A. Barrett, MD, FAAFP I am realizing that practice management in the new medicine is derived more from “group-think” than individual initiative. While this might work well for large medical organizations, where does it leave the imaginative individual physician trying to create improved medical care delivery systems? Of course, I am speaking from personal experience and raising this issue as a challenge to our medical system to be more open and inclusive and take advantage of all available bright ideas for improvement. ...

Effective models of trust: How can you incorporate the all-important ingredient of trust within your healthcare team? Once upon a time, it was possible for a doctor to hold most of what she needed to know to practice medicine within her own brain. This was long before Google and before medicine was carved up into specialties and sub-specialties. The advances brought on by the information age and technology mean that no individual can know all there is to ...

By Linda Girgis, MD In our current practice of medicine, many people don’t understand what a primary care physician (PCP) does. Some are disillusioned that the PCP serves as a glorified receptionist, just sitting in their offices to pass out referrals to specialists, the real doctors. Often, patients call my office for a referral to a specialist based on a problem that we never treated them for. Many people don’t understand why the receptionist cannot just give them a referral. A referral involves medical decision making and is part of ...

Creating sustainable, timely care delivery models designed to help patients achieve improved health outcomes is a challenge. The complex, chronic conditions of America’s workforce are driving the need for these models forcing employers into the position of leading health care delivery innovation. Employers, the primary source of insurance for 55.7% of Americans[i], have found themselves tasked with reducing healthcare’s unprecedented, rising costs to protect employee health, talent retention, productivity, and ...

There are many factors in medicine these days that have pushed primary care practice to be mostly a salaried, employed-physician model as part of a large organization. Many of the old personal autonomy benefits have been lost. Rising overhead costs and lagging fee-for-service reimbursement have made it difficult for private practitioners to fund all the required elements of the new healthcare delivery team. Additionally, there are heavy administrative burdens to achieve necessary certifications or just accomplish even simple care goals and also to follow ...

Putting Care at the Center Last week, hundreds of health professionals who work to improve care for people with complex needs gathered in Chicago for Putting Care at the Center, the third annual conference of the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs. Through various workshops targeted at idea sharing and bridging sectors and disciplines, participants delved ...

By Lara Jirmanus, MD, MPH On September 22, 2018, the Trump Administration proposed federal changes to the “public charge” regulation, which would significantly impact immigrants’ access to vital services, such as health care, nutrition and housing assistance. According to leading experts and published