Family medicine residency

The Corewell Health – Grand Rapids/Michigan State University Family Medicine Residency is a three-year program with six positions available each year. As part of their training our residents work in both urban and rural hospitals and outpatient clinics. As family physicians, we take care of the community we live in and we commit to tailoring our practice to the needs of the community. Without us, most underserved populations would lack access to primary care.

I would like to highlight a few aspects of our program that are unique. In our program, we have residents rotate in both urban and rural settings allowing residents to experience both clinical teaching environments. This prepares them to practice in either setting upon graduation. The downtown campus is in Grand Rapids where they rotate on teams with other residency programs throughout a large, urban hospital caring for children and adults with other residents and fellows. The rural setting is at United Hospital, a small community hospital in Greenville, Michigan where residents complete several rotations in an unopposed setting. Residents will have their continuity clinic at either the urban or rural location. We love to say that our residents get to experience the “best of both worlds”.

Another highlight is our close affiliation with Michigan State University. This provides us with access to academic research and education resources usually not available to smaller community programs. It is also a great opportunity for residents to develop leadership skills while working with medical students.

Our first class of residents started in 2018. As we progress, we continue to expand our medical education opportunities in innovative ways. One way we have done this is through the integration of the Lifestyle Medicine Residency Curriculum into our program, allowing all residents to get an additional board certification in lifestyle medicine upon graduation. This curriculum includes our Culinary Medicine experience which takes place during didactics. Residents really enjoy this hands-on cooking experience in which they explore the medical aspects of various disease processes using a nutrition case, while cooking together. No one seems to mind eating the results at the end of those sessions! We teach residents how to incorporate wellness and healthy habits into their own lives so that they can be role models for their patients and communities as they move into future practice. In other words, we try to practice what we preach!

We have so much more to tell you when you interview with us, like our MAT clinics, OB continuity clinic, OMT (Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment) clinics, procedural opportunities and vasectomy clinic. I encourage you to explore our website and more importantly submit your application during this interview season

Robin O’Meara, MD, Vaccine Science Fellow-AAFP
Family Medicine Residency Program Director
Spectrum Health/ Michigan State University College of Medicine Family Medicine Residency

The mission of Spectrum Health and our residency program is to improve health, instill humanity and inspire hope. To live this mission, we need strong primary care doctors who take care of patients from all walks of life, no matter where they live, from patients in downtown Grand Rapids, the second largest city in the state, to patients in rural farming and tourist communities. Therefore, when designing this residency program, we sought to address this need by training residents who could comfortably practice in both urban and rural settings.

The structure of our program has residents rotating at two main Spectrum Health locations—Butterworth Hospital and Spectrum Health Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids and Spectrum Health United Hospital in Greenville. For size comparison Butterworth Hospital has 634 beds and Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital has 242 beds, while United Hospital has 42 beds.

In addition, there are two outpatient continuity clinic sites, adjacent to each hospital in both Grand Rapids and Greenville. The Grand Rapids continuity clinic is an urban clinic with most residents from Grand Rapids and includes a large immigrant population. The United Hospital clinic is a certified rural health center with most patients from the Greenville area. The ability for residents to rotate at both sites truly allows them to experience urban and rural medicine while at a single program.

Our program is a medium-sized, university-affiliated community program with six residents accepted per year, for a total of 18 residents. This large medical education system allows us to receive strong support for our residency program by providing medical education initiatives systemwide in resident wellness, diversity and research.

Our goal is to provide excellent and comprehensive patient centered care by focusing on the continuous search for knowledge, the health of the communities we serve, and the well-being of the patients, their families and ourselves.

Program aims

1. Positively affect the health of the communities we serve by creating future family physicians who are leaders in their communities
2. Provide high quality care for our underserved populations in West Michigan
3. Achieve strong, well-rounded academics balanced with a positive, supportive learning environment

Clinical environment

Residents will be working in both an urban and rural setting, with rotations at Spectrum Health Butterworth Hospital, Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital and Spectrum Health United Hospital. The majority of the rotations will be at the rural community location, Spectrum Health United Hospital.

Spectrum Health Butterworth Hospital

• Longstanding reputation of excellence in care, diagnostics, treatment, prevention and education
• Offers a wide range of advanced medical, surgical and specialty care services
• Major tertiary and quaternary referral center for West Michigan and beyond
• The only regional burn center and level 1 trauma center in West Michigan
• Clinical leader in cardiovascular, cancer, obstetrics and gynecology, orthopedics, neurosciences, trauma and emergency care services, among many others.

Continuity clinics

First year: Residents will spend one half-day per week in their continuity clinic while on inpatient rotations and up to four half days per week while on outpatient rotations.

Second year: Residents will spend a minimum of one half-day per week in their continuity clinic and on most rotations four half days per week will be in the clinic.

Third year: Residents will spend between one and six half-days per week in their continuity clinic.

All residents will rotate through the nursing home. In each class, there will be three residents who will have clinic at the Spectrum Health Butterworth Hospital clinic and three residents who will have their clinic at the Spectrum Health United Hospital clinic.

Diversity

We strive to make every resident and faculty member at Spectrum Health feel valued and respected. We are committed to fostering and advancing inclusion and diversity in our workforce, workplace, leadership, faculty and programs. We believe in equity for everyone.

The Grand Rapids clinic serves a racially diverse group of patients: 45% White/Caucasian with 14% of these patients identifying as Hispanic, 32 % Black/African American, 9% Mixed race, 3% Asian, 1% Native American/Alaska Native. We work with the Kent County Health Department to be a primary care clinic for many of the refugee patients in Grand Rapids. Our clinic uses the most translation services within our health system to communicate with our patients in over thirty languages including: Spanish, Kinyarwanda, Swahili, Burmese, Arabic, Dari, Tigrinya, and Karen.

We see patients at both clinics that come from a lower socio-economic background giving us the opportunity to bring high quality care to this often underserved medical group. We also offer gender affirming care for transgender and gender diverse patients in both clinics.

We are dedicated to ongoing efforts that advance our values of diversity, equity and inclusion for all residents and faculty within our program. These range from small groups during didactics that develop cultural intelligence to our systemwide inclusion resource groups for people to find community and empowerment at work. We invite those that share in these values to join our team. In addition, we invite medical students to learn more about our Minority Visiting Scholars Program (see visiting learners section).

Some of our resident and fellow focused initiatives and events include:

• Diversity Journal Club

• Diversity Grand Rounds

• Diversity and Wellness Lending Library in the Resident Lounge

• Inclusion Resource Groups - employee led and formed around common demographics, characteristics or shared interests

• Day of Understanding events and conversations

• White Coats for Black Lives

• 21 Week Diversity Challenge

• Cultural competence workshops

• Diversity resources and events shared on dedicated intranet website

Click here to learn about our annual Resident Diversity Showcase for recruitment of incoming medical students.

The lifestyle medicine specialty practice at Spectrum Health opened in 2020 as a commitment to the mission of Spectrum Health. The practice empowers people to replace unhealthy behaviors with positive ones to prevent, treat and often reverse chronic disease. It is led by physicians certified in lifestyle medicine through the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and provides an active learning environment for residents involved in the lifestyle medicine residency curriculum.

Patient care and resident education is provided on-site in the lifestyle medicine practice's state-of-the-art teaching kitchen clinic and via telehealth visits. Core programs include culinary medicine, intensive therapeutic lifestyle change programs, tobacco and nicotine cessation and health coaching. The integration of the lifestyle medicine residency curriculum within the family medicine residency program provides a unique opportunity for residents to learn and apply lifestyle-first approaches to care of patients in both rural and urban communities. This also allows residents to get an additional board certification in lifestyle medicine upon graduation.

Kristi Artz, MD, Medical Director of lifestyle medicine, and Nicholas Stephanoff, MD, work collaboratively with Brian Wilder, DO (Lifestyle medicine certified and core faculty) to implement the LMRC at Spectrum Health. Drs. Artz, Wilder and Stephanoff are members of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, certified by the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine and grateful for the opportunity to participate in lifestyle medicine education as the foundation of true healthcare.

Thank you for interest in our program. The following criteria is required for application to the family medicine residency program. For more information on our program, contact our program coordinator Elizabeth LaRouche.

• All applicants must participant in the National Resident Matching Program. Our code is: 2077120C1. All applications will be accepted through the Electronic Residency Application Service.
• All candidates must possess U.S. work authorization or be eligible for J-1 status.
• Graduation from medical school should be within three years or you should be recently clinically active in the practice of medicine. Research time and observerships do not qualify as clinical involvement.
• We require three letters of recommendation plus a dean’s letter.
• Applicants must be eligible to be licensed in all 50 states and United States territories as demonstrated by: graduation from a Liaison Committee on Medical Education fully-accredited medical school or graduation from an American Osteopathic Association/Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation fully-accredited medical school.

Information for international medical graduates

• A valid Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates certification for rank by February 1.
• Applicants must have received all their medical school education from and graduated from a medical school recognized or approved by the Medical Board of California. The medical school’s name must exactly match the name on the board’s list of recognized medical schools.

Candidates should aim for the passing USMLE/COMLEX testing on the first attempt.

• All scores for part 1 and 2 must be in prior to February 1 or candidate may  not be ranked.

Visiting learners

All visiting medical student applications must be submitted through the visiting student learning opportunities program (formerly known as VSAS). For more information on visiting medical student opportunities, please visit our visiting learner page. We do accept MS4 electives for current medical students. We do not offer observerships or externships.

Minority visiting scholars program

The minority visiting scholars program (MVSP) is sponsored by the Spectrum Health Office of Medical Education. The mission of the MVSP is to enrich medical education, advance research and strengthen our clinical practices by fostering a culture of inclusion. For more information on the minority visiting scholars program, click here. MVSP is a specialized away rotation that provides mentoring for fourth and qualified third year medical students who are underrepresented in medicine, including racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+-identified and gender nonconforming individuals, individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with disabilities.

Spectrum Health provides a comprehensive and very competitive benefits package for our residents, staff and their families. In addition, our program provides educational monies to support your ongoing education. Download our salary and benefits document to learn more.