A message from:
Samantha B. Pozner, MD
Department Chair
You have chosen a wonderfully exciting time to be entering family medicine. Our emphasis on health maintenance, disease prevention and population health make the discipline of family medicine pivotal to the nationwide efforts toward improving quality, lowering the cost of care, and solving the issue of health inequity.
The Overlook Family Medicine Residency Program was established in 1973, just four years after the creation of our specialty. We have celebrated our 50th anniversary of providing an exceptional educational experience to our residents. Our two busy community-based Family Medicine Centers provide our faculty and residents with the ideal setting for learning, teaching, and delivering services to a diverse population. Our commitment to innovation and excellence is exemplified by our Primary Care Medical Home designation from the Joint Commission. Our state-of-the-art electronic medical record simplifies tasks such as closing care gaps and finding evidence-based answers to clinical questions.
Our mission is to provide high quality, evidence-based education to our learners and compassionate, cost-effective, evidence-based services to patients and families.
The goal of Overlook Family Medicine Residency Program is to offer residents a high-quality, comprehensive primary care education that:
- Understands and addresses the social, economic, and cultural dimensions of health and illness;
- Provides collaborative, holistic, family-centered health care which supports and relies on our patients' autonomy, strengths, and value;
- Appreciates patient perspectives, engagement and the capacity for self-care
- Supports and inspires residents from diverse cultural backgrounds and life experiences to embody and enact the ideals of Family Medicine.
As a regional medical center located just 20 miles from New York City, Overlook Medical Center provides all the services of a larger university-based program in the atmosphere of a community setting. Overlook Medical Center is truly nationally recognized and locally loved. Our residents get the best of both worlds – a multi-residency training environment with advanced technologies in a setting where family medicine is respected, appreciated, and embraced.
We are invigorated by the resources that our parent company, Atlantic Health System, is investing to grow our program and help us better care for our community. Atlantic Health System's strategic plan includes a significant focus on primary care, including training and retaining family physicians.
Important things to know about AHS:
- For more than a decade, Atlantic Health System has been rated as one of “100 Best Companies to Work For®” by Fortune Magazine, highlighting our high quality, high touch attitude toward health care delivery.
- Our Accountable Care Organization (ACO) was one of the first in the nation and has been consistently successful in lowering costs and improving quality for our patient population.
- AHS has an Innovation Center, Aha!, which was designed to inspire our workforce to create solutions to enhance care delivery for patients. Team members can make suggestions for a new project or get involved with existing projects.
In addition to learning the full spectrum of family medicine in an academically challenging but also supportive environment, our program offers several learning opportunities not often found elsewhere:
- Palliative Care – an area of concentration with both didactic and clinical experiences, including participation in palliative care team activities; consults, daily interdisciplinary team meetings, inpatient rounds; monthly Schwartz Center Rounds; bi-monthly bioethics committee meetings; and participation in hospice team meetings and home visits.
- Sports Medicine – monthly conferences presented by sports medicine fellows, procedure workshops and sideline management experiences.
- Medical Humanities – learning opportunities in ethics, medical narrative and the arts (including Metropolitan Museum visits in NYC) and conferences highlighting patient experiences and perspectives.
- Global Health – financial and organizational support to faculty and residents who want to pursue an opportunity to be involved in the delivery of health care in a global setting and make medical volunteerism a part of their life's work. Financial support is available through the Benjamin H. Josephson MD Fund.
As a resident at Overlook Medical Center, you will have the opportunity to explore your own personal and professional interests. Our graduates have entered fellowships in palliative care, geriatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, women's health, sports medicine and faculty development. Twenty percent of our alumni are in academic medicine, including faculty, residency program directors and department chairs. Others have chosen careers in medical management or industry, and several have established practices in international settings. Of course, we also encourage our residents to stay here in our community, joining either Atlantic Medical Group, Primary Care Partners or one of the other practices in our area.
Whatever your interests, our staff and faculty are here to provide you with an atmosphere of camaraderie, intellectual challenge, and nurturing as you train to become a culturally competent, clinically astute, highly compassionate family physician.
We look forward to meeting you.
