State-Funded MIDOCs Program Has Added It’s Fourth Cohort of Resident Physicians Committed to Serving In High-Need Areas
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 7, 2022
PRESS CONTACT: Amy Hoge (231) 499-5136 or [email protected]
LANSING, Mich. – MIDOCs, a state-funded program intended to improve access to health care in Michigan, recently accepted 24 new resident physicians into the program. Each participating resident physician has committed to practice in a primary care health professional shortage area (HPSA) during and after training and is eligible to receive up to $75,000 in loan repayment.
“I am very thankful for the MIDOCs residency expansion and loan repayment program. It is filling a significant need for the state of Michigan by expanding available primary care residency positions; as well as helping providers that choose to be a part of this program stay in state and pay down ever growing student loan burdens,” said Dr. Brandon Manderle, a physician resident at Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. “There are a plethora of qualifying job opportunities that meet the requirements of the MIDOCs program and finding these positions is made very simple."
Manderle is one of MIDOCs’ participating resident physicians from the first cohort, which is expected to begin practicing by in the next year. Upon completion of his residency this summer, Manderle will provide primary care to individuals near Kalamazoo and Portage – an area of Michigan designated to have a shortage of primary care providers.
Of Michigan’s 83 counties, 75 have at least partial designation as an underserved area for primary care services. According to a study from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), 68% of doctors who complete all of their training in one state end up practicing there.
“Our first participants have chosen the communities of Niles, St. Joe, Portage, and Kalamazoo to live and work, while others are looking at the Saginaw and Detroit areas,” said Amy Hoge, Executive Director of MIDOCs at Michigan Health Council (MHC). “All of them, so far, are choosing to continue to serve the patient populations they trained with during residency.”
The 24 new participants make up the fourth cohort of resident physicians in the MIDOCs program. While the number of medical schools in Michigan has increased in recent years – graduating the most doctors in history – the number of Graduate Medical Education residency slots remained capped until the creation of the MIDOCs program. Over the past four years, MIDOCs has created a total of 76 new residency slots across seven high-need specialties in the UP, northern Michigan, mid-Michigan, Detroit, and west Michigan.
MIDOCs funding helps enable Michigan residency programs to create new training programs in rural areas of the state. In 2020, Michigan State University (MSU) was able to create a new rural training track under the MidMichigan Family Medicine Residency in Midland in part due to the increased residency slots created through MIDOCs. There are currently two physician residents training in Alpena and two more will join them this July.
Michigan State University College of Human Medicine was also able to expand psychiatry training in the Upper Peninsula. Six rural track physician residents are currently participating in the MIDOCs program at Marquette and another two will join them this summer. MSU, in partnership with Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services, has also been able to expand their psychiatry training in Traverse City. They now have funding for six additional psychiatry residents through the MIDOCs program.
"Medical students with a desire to provide care to rural and urban underserved patient populations across Michigan are a perfect fit for the MIDOCs program," said Hoge. "Since the program is specifically designed around primary care, MIDOCs provides the opportunity for physicians to pursue this passion of increasing access to care while alleviating their medical school debt through the loan repayment offer."
MIDOCs will begin recruiting for their fifth cohort of resident physicians in the fall of 2022. For more information, visit michigandocs.org.
# # #
ABOUT MIDOCs
MIDOCs is an initiative of the MIDOCs Consortium, a partnership between Central Michigan University College of Medicine, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, Wayne State University School of Medicine, and Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. MIDOCs was created to address the physician shortage in Michigan by increasing the number of residency slots; to increase access to care in high-need, rural and urban underserved areas throughout the state by retaining residents to practice in these communities after their training; and to help alleviate medical school debt for doctors practicing in Michigan’s medically underserved communities. Learn more at michigandocs.org.
MIDOCs is managed by Michigan Health Council (MHC), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization on a mission to create products and provide services their partners rely on to build health care workforce capacity. Learn more at mhc.org.