Blogs

The Health is Primary campaign made a stop in Raleigh on April 16. Three Duke Family Medicine residents — Aaron George, DO, Farhad Modarai, DO, and Vanessa Solomon, DO — attended the event with program director Viviana Martinez-Bianchi, M.D., and assistant program director Donna Tuccero, M.D.

A few months ago when our residency program was ranked number three by U.S. News & World Report, I developed a sense of both pride and of significant responsibility to work my hardest to make sure that the ranking holds true, not just in the perceptions of those surveyed by the organization, but also in the product of our residency.

It is my privilege today to use this venue to say “thank you” for a gift our division has received from one of its veteran supporters and leaders, Samuel “Woody” Warburton, Jr., M.D., and his family. The Warburtons have provided an endowment to the Division of Family Medicine through the creation of a trust, which will be managed by Duke University.

As a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) and a former osteopathic teaching fellow, entering the allopathic match (National Resident Matching Program) last year instead of the osteopathic match (AOA Intern/Resident Registration Program) could have meant leaving behind my skills and passion for osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT).

Every year, during the third week of March, medical students from across the United States find out where they will go to complete residency training in a specialty of their choosing. Residency programs, including Duke Family Medicine, find out who will be entering training in their institutions.

It was that time of the year. Match Day was approaching, and some nights I would lie awake, wondering who our new interns would be. I would think of the outstanding young men and women we interviewed this recruiting season for the Duke Family Medicine Residency Program.

In many ways, the business world knows more about our patients than we do as health care providers. Businesses know what kind of food their customers buy, how often they fill their prescriptions, their spending patterns, and can often even predict what they will need based on analyzing this data.

So many of us in primary care now work at the juncture of individual, one-on-one patient care and the care of populations and communities that we are acutely aware of the very real issues that happen along that interface. News headlines from the past few months offer an example that many of us must address each day we are in clinic.

Most of you know that the Duke Family Medicine Center is part of Duke’s Private Diagnostic Clinic (PDC). This organization is home to the “practice plan” for Duke faculty clinicians.

It was with significant satisfaction that I read the new position paper by the American Academy of Family Physicians “Integration of Primary Care and Public Health,” a call to action, published on December 18.