U of M: Medical school class of 2025 could help shore up primary care gaps
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
Nearly half of the University of Minnesota Medical School’s class of 2025 is staying in the North Star State for residency. The school is hopeful this will help shore up the primary care provider pipeline.
A majority of Minnesota falls under a geographic or low-income primary care health professional shortage area, according to state health department data.
On Friday, fourth-year medical school students across the country found out where they’ll be spending the next 3-7 years of their careers simultaneously on the National Resident Matching Program’s Match Day. Of the 217 U of M near-graduates, 46 percent matched in a Minnesota residency program; 51 percent matched in primary care.
Dr. Jeffrey Chipman, the University of Minnesota Medical School's senior associate dean of undergraduate medical education and an acute care surgeon, said some of those students are specifically in rural programs to help increase health care in greater Minnesota.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
“I would say that rural primary care is important,” Chipman told MPR News. “But I would even broaden that to say rural health care — which I think includes internal medicine, mental health care, surgical access, obstetrical access, those types of things. So it's beyond just what we've traditionally considered rural primary care.”
Creating rural medical education programs in rural environments is important, he continued. For example, the U has had a Rural Physician Associate Program in place since 1971. The school also runs a Rural Health Research Center.
“We do know that where you tend to do your residency, you're more likely to practice in that area. So if we create more postgraduate training programs in rural Minnesota, there's a better chance that people will stay locally once they're finished,” Chipman said.
He’s also hopeful that artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies will help reduce the administrative and clerical overload often associated with primary care.
“That will alleviate a lot of the burden, allow the physician to really pay attention to the patient and what the patient's problems are,” Chipman said. “And then spending time on creating the solution rather than documenting what happened during the encounter.”
Nationally, an additional 877 primary care positions were added since last year, and nearly 94 percent of the more than 20,000 slots offered by the match were filled.
In addition to primary care, the top specialties for class of 2025 students completing residencies in Minnesota include internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry and emergency medicine. Beyond Minnesota, Gopher graduates matched in 32 other states.
The National Resident Matching Program also reported a renewed interest in emergency medicine and continued competitiveness in the OB-GYN specialty.
Graduation for U of M medical students is coming up on May 2. Most residency programs begin on July 1.
