Until this year, for example, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York had neither a department nor any family physicians on staff. Students like Demetri Blanas, 26, who were interested in becoming family doctors found little support. For the first three years of school, his training focused almost exclusively on taking care of extremely ill patients in the hospital.  

“I want to spend my career keeping people healthy rather than trying to bring them back from a very serious illness,” Blanas says. “I think it is what society needs right now, and that is important to me.”

Blanas says many of his professors discouraged him from going into primary care, telling him it was too much work, the pay was lousy, the job was boring, and it simply wasn’t as intellectually rigorous as being a specialist.

Mount Sinai ranks among the bottom 20 medical schools in the country when it come to the number of primary care doctors it graduates. But that may soon change. In June, Mount Sinai started a new department of family medicine.

Dr. Dennis Charney, dean of the medical school, says the new department represents a fundamental change in Mount Sinai’s mission.

“We want to be one of the leading medical schools that educates the next generation of primary care doctors,” he says.

The new family physicians on faculty will teach students in all four years of medical school.

The department grew out of a new partnership between Mount Sinai and the Institute for Family Health, a network of 30 community health clinics across New York.

Health systems are eyeing partnerships like this one, between hospitals and primary care groups, as a smart bet for the future. Under the federal health law, the government will offer bonuses to places that give patients better care for less money. To do that, many health systems are bolstering primary care services to manage chronic conditions and prevent hospitalizations.

Neil Calman, president and CEO of the institute, was intrigued by Mount Sinai’s partnership offer from the start. But he was also skeptical.

“It’s pretty hard to have a family medicine-based organization in a hospital and a medical school that doesn’t have a department and doesn’t recognize it as a specialty,” he says.

So Mount Sinai worked with Calman to start a department, signing institute doctors onto the faculty.

“It seemed like a natural marriage,” Calman says.

“I think people are finally realizing that the country will be bankrupt if we continue to admit people and readmit people for conditions that could be prevented with good primary care,” Calman says. It is a realization he has been waiting awaiting for the past 30 years.

“I went into family medicine believing that was exactly what the country needed,” he says. “Unfortunately, it’s taken a little longer for everybody else to realize that than I expected.”

Read or listen to the original story by Jenny Gold here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/09/23/161562777/the-next-frontier-for-elite-med-schools-primary-care

The Teaching Health Center grant will allow the Institute to create and sponsor the Harlem Residency in Family Medicine, one of only a handful of health center-led residencies in the country. The program will train physicians to provide outstanding care to patients of all ages using the community health center model of service delivery.

“The Institute’s Family Health Center at North General in Harlem offers an unparalleled opportunity to train residents and students to provide patient-focused care to the Harlem community,” said Dr. Neil Calman, President and CEO of the Institute for Family Health. “The Institute has a strong track record of training family medicine residents who continue to practice in high-need communities, and the addition of a Harlem-based residency program will allow us to attract more committed family physicians, many of whom will choose to stay here once their training is complete.”

The Institute, the only agency in New York State to receive inaugural Teaching Health Centers funding from HRSA in 2011, used the original award to expand its Mid-Hudson Family Medicine Residency Program from 18 to 30 residents. The Institute also operates the Beth Israel Residency in Urban Family Practice, a residency program based in Manhattan and sponsored by the Beth Israel Medical Center. The Harlem program will draw on the faculty expertise and curricula of these existing programs when it opens in June 2012. Since the residency in family medicine is community based, the largest portion of the residents’ time will be spent in outpatient care. Inpatient experiences are currently in development at area hospitals.

“There is such high demand for effective primary care and preventive services in this community. Last year, we provided over 45,000 visits to patients from Harlem,” said Dr. Eric Gayle, the Institute’s regional medical director for the Bronx and Harlem, “This is a community that values good physicians – it’s ideal for a new residency training program.”

Dr. Robert Schiller, the Institute’s senior vice president for medical affairs and chair of the Institute’s graduate medical education committee, added, “HRSA’s Teaching Health Centers program is a big step forward in making primary care a focus of graduate medical education funding. We are grateful to HRSA and our partners in Harlem for giving us the opportunity to train new family physicians in this diverse and proud neighborhood.”

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The Institute for Family Health is a federally qualified health center network that operates 26 practices in New York State. The centers offer primary care, dental care and mental health care for children and adults. In 2002, the Institute became the first health center network in the state to have an electronic health record and practice management system. In 2009 all Institute centers received the highest recognition from the National Committee for Quality Assurance as Patient Centered Medical Homes.