Celebrating on September 9 in Pontiac were (left to right) Oakland County Board of Commissioners Chair Dave T. Woodward; Eduardwil Hernandez Vegas, MD – resident graduate; Faris Shlash, MD– resident graduate; Bo Seluska, Residency Program Administrator; Lizmar Rivera Nuñez, MD– resident graduate; Representative Brenda Carter; Michael Robinson, member of Board of Directors-Honor Community Health; Naga Preethi Kadiri, MD-– resident graduate; Anmol Rattan Singh Riar, MD-– resident graduate (behind Dr. Kadiri); Oluwabusayo Tolulope Alade, MD– resident graduate; Dr. Michael Yocum, Board President, Honor Community Health (behind Dr. Alade); Oakland County Commissioner Ann Erickson Gault; Senator Rosemary Bayer; Senator Jeremy Moss; Nikhil Hemady, MD, chief Medical officer Honor Community Health; Jason Ramos, residency program director – Honor Community Health; and Debra Brison, chief medical officer and Designated Institutional Official – Honor Community Health.
(Photo courtesty of Honor Community Health)
The mood was celebratory and inspirational on the evening of September 9th in a Pontiac ballroom, as six medical residents graduated to the physician level after completing their training at Honor Community Health, a federally-qualified health center with 18 clinical sites throughout Oakland County.
The residency program, the first of its kind in Oakland County, aims to train new physicians in a community care setting instead of a hospital. The U.S. faces a growing shortage of primary care doctors in both rural and urban areas, with federal projections showing a national shortage of nearly 70,000 doctors who practice in primary care (family medicine, geriatrics, pediatrics and internal medicine).
“The shortage of family physicians continues to challenge healthcare systems across Michigan and our nation, making investments in primary care training more important than ever,” said Dr. Nik Hemady, chief medical officer at Honor Community Health. “Through Honor Community Health’s Family Medicine Residency Program, we are building a sustainable pipeline of compassionate, highly skilled family physicians who are prepared to care for patients in the communities that need them most.”
Honor brainstormed the community care residency model several years ago, having foreseen the shortage of primary care doctors in the pipeline. Through a federal Health Resources Services and Administration (HRSA) grant and generous support from both Oakland County and the state Legislature, the program came to fruition, enrolling its first six residents in 2023. The program will continue with two future cohorts of three-year residents in training.
“As family physicians, we get the opportunity to care for patients through the years, sometimes even multiple generations of a family,” said Brandon Karmo, DO, FAAFP, a family medicine physician in Farmington Hills and president of the Michigan Academy of Family Physicians. “It is an incredibly rewarding career to have that long-term patient relationship, and we absolutely need more primary care physicians as our population ages.”
Deb Brinson, CEO of Honor Community Health, said: “Innovation in health care doesn’t just mean advanced technology and AI - it means finding ways to provide the fullest possible education to new physicians and leaning into new models of supportive, preventative care so we can keep people from getting to the point where they need expensive, acute care. We’re extremely grateful to the Oakland County Board of Commissioners, state lawmakers and the federal administration for their support. In recognizing the need for more primary care doctors in this region, they’ve also helped support a training model that will impact our community and many others well into the future.”
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