Carrying a Message of Hope

For the second year in a row, and the second time in my life, I recently attended the American Academy of Family Physicians National Conference. Held in Kansas City, Missouri, it is an educational and networking event for family medicine residents and medical students aspiring to a career in family medicine from all over the nation. This is easily my favorite event of the year, because I get to look in their bright faces, where I see the future of healthcare in America, and tell them I am so proud of them for choosing family medicine, the most valuable, cross-functional, adaptable, and challenging specialty in all of medicine. I get to tell them how important they are to the future of our healthcare system. I get to discuss with them their career plans after residency and unpack the perils of working for a big system and the promise of practicing in an independent setting. I get to give them the gift of hope.

This year, I was grateful to be joined by Dr. Sabina Singh and her husband Ken Strmiska of Green Bay, WI. Dr. Singh and Mr Strmiska are Elation customers and co-founders of Anovia Health. Despite their busy schedules managing a rapidly growing direct primary care (DPC) practice, Dr. Singh and Mr. Strmiska voluntarily dedicated their valuable time to promote primary care independence at our Elation conference booth. This gesture is particularly noteworthy given their remarkable growth trajectory - expanding from a single location to eight clinics in just three years, thanks to both their business acumen and the scalability of the Elation platform.

I was also fortunate to be joined by my coworker Michael Lock, Elation’s product marketing manager. This was his first healthcare conference, having worked in other industries before joining Elation, and you can read his reflections in this insightful blog post.

Together, the four of us engaged in conversation after conversation with students and residents about their future career options, the resources available to help guide their decisions, and the opportunity to protect both their professional autonomy and their sanity by choosing the independent setting. And of course independent primary care is the only way they’ll have the opportunity to choose an electronic health record (EHR) system - where they will spend a large portion of their professional lives - purpose-built for the unique work of primary care. Dr.Singh turned out to be a natural champion for this conversation, having herself worked for a system for a very long time, experienced the professional disillusionment personally, and courageously left it all behind to start a new business in independent primary care, using just such an EHR - Elation.

One of our booth visitors was Dr. Neha Basnet, who is in her final year of family medicine residency in Nebraska. She and her fiancé (internal medicine resident) plan to inherit his father’s practice, Z Family Practice, after graduation, and they are a new Elation customer. Dr.Basnet has already started using Elation while preparing to take over the practice, and she loves it. We were delighted to hear her story and gratified to know she’ll be practicing with independence using an EHR that she loves.

Direct Primary Care: A New Frontier

Elation is a longtime friend of the direct primary care community, with thousands of DPC users scattered across the nation. I personally have practiced in the DPC model for many years and have numerous colleagues who have abandoned the conventional insurance-based system to practice in the DPC model as well. One such colleague is Dr. Maryal Concepcion, famous for her highly popular podcast, My DPC Story.

Dr. Concepcion was unable to attend the conference this year, so I was happy to promote her podcast at the Elation booth in her absence. I was unprepared, however, for the amount of traffic her My DPC Story banner would drive to the Elation booth. Unlike last year’s conference when very few students were even mentioning DPC, this year’s conference had a great big DPC buzz! The vast majority of visitors to our booth noticed Dr.Concepcion’s banner and approached us to learn more about the podcast and the DPC model, saying they had heard about DPC in one way or another. Dr. Singh and I were happy to talk about our own experiences in DPC, recommend the podcast, and refer visitors to the DPC Alliance booth for even more information. 

We were also surprised and thrilled to see Elation bumper stickers on arguably the most fun part of the entire event. We are very grateful to the AAFP for promoting the Elation brand associated with a parade of dogs driving race cars festooned with reminders of this year’s superbowl winners!

Supporting the Next Generation

Finally, we handed out flyers about Primary Care for All Americans - a grassroots campaign to educate about the crucial importance of primary care to society and promote community organizing to help solve the growing problem we all face of inadequate primary care in our nation. We have examined the problem long enough and it is time to do something about it. This is exactly why Elation Health invests in our participation in events like National Conference, where we can help save the family medicine specialty by sparing our young colleagues from years of overwhelm, moral injury, and despair through the message of primary care independence. And it is why we all must get involved, because this truly impacts us all - our families, our personal health and wealth, our economy, and the health of our society. 

See you again next year, National Conference! In 2025, I’m bringing more friends.