Fort Wayne Family Medicine Residency

The Fort Wayne Medical Education Program serves 300,000 patients in Fort Wayne, Indiana, including the nation’s largest Burmese immigrant population.  This recent influx of Burmese immigrants encouraged Fort Wayne to transforming its medical systems – both public and private – into more patient-centered and coordinated care models across the entire medical community.

To educate its residents on the core tenets of patient-centered medical homes (PCMH), the program utilizes an interdisciplinary team approach consisting of four different groups of doctors, nurses and front office staff led by a faculty member. The interdisciplinary team has access to a multitude of service providers such as pharmacists, diabetes educators, patient care coordinators, neuropsychologists and psychologists, physician assistants, medical and social work students, etc.

One of the highlights of the program’s PCMH efforts has been the development of a single, combined quality, system-based improvement analysis project in which all residents participate each year. The program also educates residents on principles of leadership, population management, and interdisciplinary care.

The project is in its fourth year of development and has addressed well child visits/immunizations, coronary artery disease, diabetes, and is currently addressing asthma. Skill sets that are developed during this process include: performing literature searches to identify evidenced-based medicine; adapting data fields in the electronic medical record to reflect and retrieve the data essential to population management; developing the PDSA cycle (Plan, Do, Study, Act) used in system analysis and quality improvement, etc.

Group visits for its diabetic population have been introduced into the program, offering a unique opportunity for residents to provide care in a group setting and engage patients at different levels. The educational component of group visits focuses on the disease process itself, behavioral health science, and specialty service education such as podiatry. This project has also become a research opportunity for residents who conduct research beginning with formulating an idea, going through the IRB process, and completing the research project. Plans to expand group visits for pain diagnoses and pregnancy are in place.

Fort Wayne’s Program offers experience in procedural skills such as low-risk, high-risk and surgical obstetrics, obstetrical ultrasound, colposcopy, cryosurgery, excision and dermatologic procedures, treadmill stress tests, electrocardiogram interpretation, joint injection, and osteopathic manipulation. This prepares future family medicine physicians for a variety of potential practice environments – from rural to urban and the underserved.