As a hospitalist physician, I mostly see patients who arrive through the emergency room. By that point, they have acute conditions that demand immediate medical attention.
But many of these hospital admissions would be not necessary if patients had first seen a primary care physician — someone who could help a heart failure patient monitor his water retention levels and avoid low oxygen and fluid in his lungs or counsel a diabetic patient on how to prevent a severe infection.
But many of my patients don’t have access to a primary care provider. Or if they do, they don’t see one regularly because the office is too far away or the physician is overbooked. The fact is, there simply aren’t enough physicians to meet the health needs of Colorado patients.
These scenarios break my heart. What does an advanced health care system matter if people can’t receive basic medical care? More than 1.2 million Coloradans live in areas that have a shortage of primary care doctors, according to the health policy organization KFF. The situation is getting worse; a third of physicians in the U.S. are likely to retire in the next 10 years.
But a pool of qualified physicians in our own backyard is available to fill these gaps: graduates of foreign medical schools. These doctors have the skills, experience and talent to provide excellent medical care and are already dedicated members of Colorado communities.
They arrive in the United States eager to resume the careers they began abroad — but encounter a cumbersome system that doesn’t translate their prior education and experiences in a meaningful way. Instead, they often take lower-skilled and lower-paying jobs, such as home-care attendants or rideshare drivers. Their valuable medical training and experience is wasted, and Colorado communities miss out.
The state estimates that as of 2017, there were roughly 3,000 immigrants in Colorado whose health-related undergraduate degrees were underutilized.
I lead a group called Colorado Works for International Physicians, and I’ve trained alongside enough of them to know that they are highly capable and caring doctors.
In fact, they often bring unique skills, including (often multiple) foreign languages and cultural sensitivities and insight that would benefit our underserved communities. They understand firsthand the experiences of immigrants and refugees and can build trust and bridge the chasm that often exists when providing medical care to these communities.
That’s why we created an onramp to quickly train these doctors to meet U.S. licensing requirements. Our nine-month program provides graduates of foreign medical schools specialized clinical experience in the U.S. health care system.
It’s modeled after a similar program at the University of Minnesota Medical School, which has successfully trained such doctors to enter a primary-care residency program, eventually take national board exams, and ultimately become licensed to practice medicine in Colorado. We identify top medical talent and ensure they learn about U.S. medical standards and are prepared to meet the needs of patients.
We have accepted our first cohort of four students as part of our pilot program, and I’m excited about the potential of this model to pump fresh medical talent into our employment pipeline. I’m calling on state legislators and hospital administrators to consider ongoing funding and expansion of the program.
No Coloradan should suffer from a lack of access to medical care when we have qualified, local professionals to provide it. By getting them up to speed on U.S. medical practices, including medical ethics and the complexities of our insurance systems, we’re training a new pool of qualified doctors to take care of all of us in the long run.
Philip Fung, M.D., is an academic hospitalist at Denver Health and medical director of Colorado Works for International Physicians in partnership with the Spring Institute.
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