Clinical Family Medicine (FM) at UPMC: Board certified Family Physicians work in a number of roles and settings in the UPMC clinical operations. Most FM physicians at UPMC (484) are employed as primary care providers in community-based practices (along with 230 NPs and 209 PAs) and in the hospital setting when their patients have been admitted. Board Certified FM physicians work as hospitalists in the UPMC system including routinely delivering babies at Magee Women’s hospital. Surgical Obstetrics certified Family Medicine physicians can also deliver babies via Cesarean section. Faculty focused on training and research 147 FM physicians provide primary care in 14 academic offices across the UPMC system.
Over the most recent 2-year period, overall UPMC Ambulatory Operations cared for 2.76 M patients in 17.69 M visits of whom 882,400 patients were seen in 3.8 million family medicine office visits.
A Division of Health Informatics helps to coordinate and optimize clinical operations across the clinical sites.
Academic Family Medicine at Pitt and UPMC
The Academic Family Medicine network consists of 14 clinical offices across 8 FM Residency programs across the western and central regions of Pennsylvania. The full spectrum of Family Medicine, including pediatrics and prenatal care, labor and delivery is practiced and taught in these offices. The trainees include 185 Family Medicine residents, 10 of whom are also residents in Psychiatry, 9 Pharmacy residents along with fellows in sports medicine, palliative care, geriatrics, education and surgical obstetrics. The Department coordinates training and certification in Lifestyle Medicine in all 8 residency programs.
The Academic Family Medicine network served 60,330 diverse patients through 277,500 visits in a two-year period. The patient population is 60% white and 27% black; 60% female; 59% Urban and 41% are Medicaid insured.
The academic clinical sites serve the broader institution as a set of implementation sites for new initiatives focused on improving clinical care.
The Department is the home to two novel primary care clinical operations: The Primary Care Precision Medicine Clinic and the Lifestyle Medicine Clinic
- The Primary Care Precision Medicine Clinic is a primary care clinical site staffed by Board Certified Family Medicine Physicians and Board-certified medical geneticists. Their approach integrates traditional primary care/family medicine with a patient’s individual characteristics, including genetics, physiology, environmental exposures, and lifestyle.
- The Lifestyle Medicine Clinic is an innovative health center dedicated to helping patients transform their health through evidence-based lifestyle medicine therapies that attack the root causes of disease and promote health and longevity.
The Academic Family Medicine network is coordinated through the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh which is the anchor for undergraduate medical education and scholarly work. Family Medicine faculty have key leadership and teaching roles in undergraduate medical education in the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The focus of work for faculty in the FM Department ranges from full time clinical to full time research, most of whom also spend a portion of their time teaching. The Department coordinates a series of Grand Rounds lectures and an annual Refresher Course that brings together hundreds of primary care providers in Pittsburgh each year.
The Department of Family Medicine has long established lines of research with a focus on vaccines ranging from policy to practice. This work has included implementation science leading to the development of the 4 Pillars Practice Transformation Program for Immunizations; cost-effectiveness and agent-based modeling studies for influenza and pneumococcal vaccines; influenza and COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness studies, immunology studies of vaccines and clinical trials.
The Department is establishing a new line of research in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Primary Care in collaboration with the American Board of Family Medicine.
The Department is collaborating with the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) in the formation of a practice-based research network (PBRN). This network will serve both internal scholarly needs of the FM faculty and residents as they work together to explore internally sourced research questions and as an interface to investigators external to Family Medicine who are interested in collaborative scholarly work. There is a strong internal interest in implementing the best available evidence for the care of patients and training of future physicians.
The FM academic network serves a diverse population in terms of age, race and geography. In a setting with this level of diversity that is bound together by the common discipline of Family Medicine there are opportunities to work toward solving some of the most important challenges that undermine equity in health outcomes.