Welcome to our Primary Care Training Program website and thank you for your interest in our program. I consider it a great honor and privilege to supervise and teach residents and share with them the joy of providing longitudinal care to the diverse community of patients who come to us with their most personal needs. I have tremendous enthusiasm about the practice of internal medicine and have always found working with patients to be personally and intellectually rewarding. My goal as Associate Program Director is to foster the career and patient care skills of each individual resident in our program by helping them align their education with their professional goals and personal values.

Joan Addington-White, MD Associate Program Director Director of the Primary Care Track

Introduction

The University of Wisconsin Internal Medicine Residency Primary Care Track is designed to graduate the next generation of general internists to serve adults with all their health care needs. Residents are scheduled in carefully selected outpatient and inpatient venues where they provide care to a highly diverse patient population under the guidance of hand-picked faculty members known for their effective teaching skills. Since 1973 University of Wisconsin general medicine faculty members have maintained a primary care track, integrated it with managed care and other staffing models, and taken advantage of the adjacent School of Medicine and Public Health and the University of Wisconsin's top-tier research campus to create a generation of clinicians, teachers, and researchers who now work in private and academic centers throughout the nation. Our primary care track emphasizes patient-centered care by applying the tenets of benevolence, altruism, and equity, and the leadership ensures individualized and flexible scheduling to allow all residents to achieve their specific career aspirations and personal and professional balance.

Goals and Objectives

The goal of the primary care track is to graduate internists who are able to:

• Critically assess and continuously update their knowledge throughout their careers by applying the evidence-based medicine skills learned and practiced throughout residency.
• Implement the doctor-patient skills taught to them in workshops and clinical settings in order to develop continuous healing relationships with each of their patients.
• Apply the principles of performance improvement to assess the quality of care in their patient panels and modify care processes in order to improve patient outcomes.
• Develop medium and long-term goals and objectives, tasks to achieve those goals, and means of monitoring progress so that they can enhance their career and work-life balance throughout their lives.
• Select a career path most suitable for their professional joy and personal and work-life balance. This career path may be in general medicine or in subspecialty care, depending on each resident's individual choice.

Program Highlights

The following are highlights of our primary care track:

• Residents spend eight months over the course of three years (2 months as a PG1, 3 months each as a PG2 and PG3) of ambulatory block experience developing the broad range of outpatient skills needed for their careers by practicing medicine in ambulatory general, sub-specialty medicine, or surgical teaching clinics.
• Residents serve as primary care physicians for their own panel of patients. They assess preventive and chronic disease measure outcomes and plan with faculty members how to improve processes of care so that their patient outcomes steadily improve over the course of training.
• Residents participate in a web-based, case-based, and well-referenced curriculum on a weekly basis with their continuity clinic attending. This three-year curriculum comprehensively reviews the field of primary care.
• Residents are exposed continuously to quality care practices in the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, which ranks in the top five University Hospitals in the U.S. for quality of care, the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital, which ranks second for quality indicators in the VA system, and Meriter Hospital, which has been named a "top 100 private hospital" in the U.S. on several quality measures.
• Our senior residents have a very popular second weekly half day of clinic in the specialty or subspecialty of their choice
• Residents are given the flexibility to choose among elective months to participate in the clinical, education, or research programs of their choice as listed in the areas of excellence below.

Areas of Excellence
Rotations
Continuity Clinic Experience and Curriculum
Outcomes and Evaluation