The following curriculum innovations support our commitment to graduating residents who are competent to lead change and deliver effective, personal, high-quality care.

Community Education Initiative

This project provides eight community health centers statewide with electronic medical record technology, which is used to capture and analyze clinical data. The community health centers have formed a QI network to develop the record as a tool for evidence-based care management, becoming model COPC teaching practices. Second and third-year residents, spend 10 weeks at one of these eight community health centers carrying out a COPC project performing community and practice assessment, developing an intervention for an identified problem, and evaluating the results.

Collaborative Care Service

This innovation involves the integration of behavioral health and primary care. The Capital Region Family Health Center serves as the internship site for six psychology and family therapy interns. Program therapists supervise the interns, providing comprehensive care to patients and families. Residents and therapists often see patients together, applying a systems model to go beyond traditional mental health diagnoses and address critical issues of generalist practice, including:

• The doctor/patient relationship
• Psychosomatic problems
• Compliance issues
• Coping with chronic illness
• Psychodynamic concerns
• Problems of living
• End-of-life care

Maternal–Child Health

Central to family medicine is care of the family unit. Childbirth and parenting is the core dimension of many families. Our residency combines nursery, pediatrics and obstetrics in a required experience over the first two years using family physicians as supervisors and role models. This intensive experience with young families provides grounding for residents in family dynamics and the clinical knowledge necessary to strengthen family relationships, regardless of the practice style they may choose for a career.

Electronic Medical Records

Capital Region Family Health Center, the practice site for training family physicians, uses Logician – the leading full-featured EMR and is “paperless”. Much of the residency’s scholarly activity is aimed at developing the EMR as a tool for practicing evidence based medicine. This includes incorporation of guidelines and decision support into clinical encounter forms, monitoring care management and populations, clinical improvement using practice based data and reducing errors of communication among practitioners.

Organizational and Leadership Training

Care of patients is delivered in office settings in the context of larger institutions and the community. To be effective practitioners, graduates will need not only clinical knowledge but also skills to advocate for their patients within organizations and to lead innovation and change.

To learn these skills residents complete six core workshops, lasting one to five days, over the three years of the program, including:

• Personality and perceptions
• Communication styles
• Leadership and competence
• Conflict resolution
• Negotiation
• Team working