UnitedHealthcare of New England donated $250,000 to the Rhode Island Foundation's loan forgiveness program last week as part of a series of grants from state and national organizations encouraging medical students, including those at Alpert Medical School, to pursue careers in primary care.
The funds are allocated to former Rhode Island medical students who practice primary care in-state to help them repay student loans, said Yvette Mendez, grants programs officer at the Rhode Island Foundation.
The program allows eligible doctors to receive up to $20,000 a year for four years to help pay their loans, said Neil Steinberg '75, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation.
Steinberg said the program has been in existence for a couple years. The $250,000 grant will provide funds for eight physicians enrolled in the program, including two graduates of the Med School.
Loan forgiveness is just one route national and state organizations are taking to provide incentive for students to pursue careers in primary care, a field constantly in need of more doctors.
Last year, the Rhode Island Foundation awarded the Med School an $87,631 grant for a mentorship program, allowing medical students to work with physicians involved in primary care. "Research shows that when a student is out training with a physician, (the physician's) productivity reduces," Mendez said. The money, she said, would help to "offset some of these costs."
The Med School has an ongoing relationship with the foundation, said Philip Gruppuso, the associate dean for medical education at the Med School and the principle investigator for the Rhode Island Foundation grant. He said the school knew the foundation was interested in primary care and decided to apply for a grant to fund its mentorship program.
"Students make career decisions based on their interactions with physicians who become role models for them," Gruppuso said.
Since the program's establishment in May, recruiting primary care physicians to teach students has been significantly easier due to the additional funds they now receive.
Gruppuso said he is also currently acting as the principal investigator for a curriculum development grant from the National Institutes of Health in partnership with the Albert Einstein Medical School in New York. The grant, he said, will allow the Med School and Albert Einstein to develop a "comprehensive four-year population health curriculum."
"This is another part of the equation," he said. "Population health is at the core of primary care."
Although the grant was awarded last spring, faculty members from the two schools are still in the midst of designing the curriculum.
Some aspects of the new curriculum — specifically related to epidemiology for second-year medical students — have already been implemented this year.
Mendez and Gruppuso both said it is too early to determine what effect these programs will have, though they added they hope the programs will prove effective in encouraging more medical students to enter primary care careers.
"It's a challenge everybody needs to come at from multiple angles," Gruppuso said. "Everything that makes a primary care career more attractive and more feasible for our students is going to have a beneficial effect."
