Kaiser Permanente launches new residency program

Dr. Elia Cole got her first introduction to Santa Rosa last December, when the hillsides to the east were still blackened and thousands of residential and commercial lots in the northern part of the city were littered with fire debris.

Cole, 30, came to interview for a slot in Kaiser Permanente’s new family medicine residency program. Ever since, she’s fallen in love with the fire-scarred city and the people in it.

“Since coming here, I’ve met a lot of people who have lost homes,” Cole said. “It’s just inspiring to me, as a human being, the ability to move forward with a sense of optimism in the wake of such substantial loss.”

Cole, who is from upstate New York, received her medical degree from Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences-College of Osteopathic Medicine. The optimism and resiliency she witnessed among both local Kaiser staff and patients in the aftermath of the fire played a big role in her decision to join the Kaiser residency program.

Kaiser’s model of integrated medicine, which brings together multiple aspects of medical care into a single system, was another reason Cole chose the residency program.

“It was my first choice. ... I met the faculty ahead of time and I thought that they had a genuine, bubbly passion for teaching,” she said. “I wanted to be at a Kaiser facility. I believe it is the future of American health care.”

Cole is one of six new resident physicians in the fledgling program, which received its accreditation in February 2017. The six physicians, three of whom are from California, started the three-year residency program in late June and began seeing patients in July.

By 2020, the program will host 18 residents, who upon graduation will be given the option to go wherever they want work. Dr. Tricia Hiserote, a Kaiser family medicine physician and director of the residency program, said a national shortage in primary care physicians will undoubtedly make doctors like Cole a hot commodity.

According to a new data published by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the United States could experience a shortage of up to 120,000 primary and specialty care doctors by 2030.

Primary care doctors will become increasingly in demand in Sonoma County and the rest of the nation as the baby boom generation continues to age, Hiserote said after Kaiser’s residency program was accredited last year.

Sonoma County has only one primary care doctor for every 1,000 residents, according to the most recent County Health Rankings by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. That rate is better than the state’s 1-to-1,280 ratio, but much less than Marin and San Francisco counties, which have ratios of 1-to-680 and 1-to-630, respectively.

Residency programs are a crucial way to increase the number of doctors in a community, as many physicians remain in the area where they do their residency.

Kaiser’s new residency program in Santa Rosa joins the more venerable Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency program, which has been a training ground for family doctors since 1938. That residency program is sponsored by Sutter Health and affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Daniel Ayala-Ortiz, 29, one of Kaiser’s new residents, knows he’ll be able to go wherever he wants after completing his residency. But Ayala-Ortiz, who grew up in Ukiah and attended medical school at the University of California in Davis, said he wants to say in the North Coast.

The young doctor’s parents still live in Ukiah and often come down to see him whenever he has time off. He said he used to travel to Santa Rosa, the “big city,” to go to the mall with his family when he was young.

Ayala-Ortiz said he had planned to return to Ukiah to work as a doctor once he graduated, but he’s grown fond of Santa Rosa. He said that just before the fire last October he did a month-long rotation at Kaiser Medical Center while he was still in medical school.

“I just really fell in love with the location and the mentors here and the patient population,” he said.

On one recent day, Ayala-Ortiz treated a patient, Megan Sorensen, 38, of Santa Rosa, who was complaining of shoulder pain. The visit was conducted under the supervision of Dr. Rachel Friedman, a family medicine physician.

Sorensen said being treated by a new doctor has its advantages.

“I always think it’s nice to work with residents, because they are up-to-date on the latest medical guidelines and trainings,” she said.

That same day, Hiserote, the residency program director, sat alongside Cole in an office as the resident doctor initiated a “telephone appointment” with a patient. Though the patient was not home, Hiserote walked Cole through the process step-by-step, showing her how to log the call in the patient’s medical record. That process included sending a message to other Kaiser staff for possible follow-up care. In closing the message, Hiserote said, “And I always think writing ‘thank you’ is important.”

Hiserote said Kaiser made an effort to ensure that half the doctors in the residency program were from the region. Aside from Ayala-Ortiz, California residents include Dr. Tracy Krinard, 29, of Sebastopol and Dr. Lauren Glaser, 29, of Sunnyvale.

To learn more about the Kaiser residency program, visit https://residency-ncal.kaiserpermanente.org/programs/fm/santa-rosa.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.