CLINIC

The clinic experience is the heart of our program. Our mission is to provide superior education in family medicine through an ambulatory, team-focused, longitudinal training experience which:

Ensures medical competence through measurable clinical outcomes
Maximizes continuity of care through utilization of our Clinic First curricular strategy
Provides comprehensive services to a diverse patient population
Emphasizes cost effective care
Teaches residents skills in practice assessment and management
Utilizes EPIC electronic medical records and Dragon dictation software

Located on the hospital campus, our clinic has over 30,000 patient visits each year. Continuity patients receive exceptional care from resident physicians under the guidance of faculty and clinic pharmacists. The clinic’s broad scope of practice includes:

Reproductive health care
Complete prenatal and maternity care
Child, adolescent, and adult medicine
Geriatric care
Chronic disease management (diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, and anxiety)
A clinical pharmacist available for medication questions, anti-coagulation therapy, and diabetes care
Specialty clinics (procedures, integrative medicine, psychiatry, pediatrics, travel medicine, behavioral health, high-risk obstetrics and gynecology, and osteopathic manual manipulation)

Our clinic’s patient population is extremely diverse. More than 50 percent of the patient population is low income and includes a large medically underserved obstetrical population. The clinic serves a substantial number of geriatric and pediatric patients as well. Our service area is home to large populations of Southeast Asian, Latino, Eastern European, and African patients. To better serve our community, the clinic has professional translation via telephone and Skype.

Patient care is provided via four teams consisting of two residents from each class (with a third-year resident team leader), faculty, nurses, and support staff. Each resident has his or her own panel of patients for which he or she is responsible, and each team is primarily responsible for the outpatient care of all patients assigned to the primary care physicians on that team.

Valley Family Medicine quality measures, such as diabetic management and childhood immunization rates, exceed the national average. The State of Washington has given special recognition to the clinic for achieving a 100 percent immunization rate for two-year-olds and over 80 percent for 24 to 35-month-old children. The program is a certified Patient Centered Medical Home.

Clinic First

Clinic First is a philosophy first articulated at this program that prioritizes the outpatient clinic experience in residency education. A key tenet of this philosophy is maximizing continuity of care between residents and their clinic patients and managing patients panels to optimize resident exposure to a wide range of clinical conditions. R-2s and R-3s see patients in clinic on average four days a week, and R-1s are in clinic two to four days weekly, depending on their rotation.

The benefits of Clinic First are:

Emphasis on the central role of outpatient care in family medicine
Same-day acute visits with the primary care physician
Daily communication between staff and physicians to enhance patient care
Patient continuity approaching 75 percent by the third year of training

Focus Clinic

In Focus Clinic, residents are coached one-on-one by family medicine physician and behavioral science faculty. This experience is scheduled up to twice per month during a resident’s continuity clinic throughout their 3 years of residency training. Special emphasis is placed on doctor-patient interaction and communication, understanding the biomedical and human context of each visit, and strategies to improve the efficiency of ambulatory care.

Specialty Clinics

Psychiatry and Pediatric specialists, as well as family physicians with advanced skills, provide one-on-one instruction at Valley Family Medicine to second and third-year residents in our “specialty clinics.” These include: office procedures, travel medicine, integrative medicine, psychiatry, counseling, pediatrics, high risk obstetrics, and OMT. These clinics serve as referral resources for all residency physicians. Referred patients are seen by both the resident and faculty consultant to maximize the educational experience. Following the appointment in a specialty clinic, the primary physician is notified of the findings and treatment plan. Our high-risk OB clinic enables residents to continue to care for patients with a history of C-section delivery whether they are interested in having a repeat C-section or a TOLAC. OMT clinics are currently reserved for residents graduating from Osteopathic schools.