Osteopathic medical education: Highlights that are good for U.S. health care

Primary care, high-need specialties and medically underserved areas all benefit from osteopathic medical education. Robert A. Cain, DO, FACOI, FAODM, is president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine is the nation’s leading advocate for osteopathic medical education. He points out highlights from a recent study about the economid effects of COMs, or colleges of osteopathic medicine.

Medical Economics: To continue in some discussion about that workforce and economic impact report, what are some findings from that report that you would like to highlight?

Robert A. Cain, DO, FACOI, FAODME: You know, we are particularly happy with the results on primary care. We've talked for a long time about the positioning of osteopathic medicine around primary care, the role it can play. When you look at our principles, one of which is this focus on body, mind and spirit, as well as the others, it's not a surprise that whether you enter primary care or that you would take that into primary care. It aligns very well to what happens in primary care. But it's also very aligned to some of the the high-need specialties as well. So one of the findings of the report that's exciting is that roughly 50% of our graduates, if you look at all the colleges of osteopathic medicine, are going into primary care. Every single one of our colleges exceeded 45% of their graduates doing so. That's more than twice that of our colleagues. Very needed in today's health care system. But we also were able to show that about 25% of our graduates are going into high-need specialties, areas like general surgery, obstetrics, psychiatry, things that are also important to maintaining that general health. We're very pleased with the fact that our colleges are placed, over half of them are placed in medically underserved areas. That's going to be important to trying to change health care delivery in those, especially if we talk about graduates ultimately staying and practicing in the areas where they've trained. About half of the colleges are also in rural-adjacent designated areas, so counties where at least 20% of the population is designated as rural, so we were really happy to see that. We're also pleased with the rural placement number so that our graduates are training in the areas where we want them to train, and then staying in those areas, in particular rural areas. And so some of the COMs, colleges of osteopathic medicine, had fairly high numbers of students who have remained then ultimately in rural settings. Also, I think, a bit of information around our community-based model. So we tend to use a model where we place students into community institutions, where they can become uncommonly good at the common things, where they become part of those communities. And hopefully by doing so, both through medical education and then graduate medical education, they're more likely to stay there and practice.