Family Medicine

A message from:
Susan T. Kaye, MD, Department Chair

You have certainly chosen a wonderfully exciting time to be entering family medicine. The new push for health care reform places primary care front and center as one solution to solving the health care crisis. At Overlook Hospital’s Family Medicine Department we are invigorated by the resources that our parent company, Atlantic Health, is investing to improve and grow our Family Medicine Residency Program. Atlantic Health’s five year strategic plan includes a significant focus on primary care, including training and retaining family physicians. The implementation of  state-of-the-art electronic health records and our restructuring as a medical home with National Collaborative for Quality Assurance (NCQA) certification will advance our mission of innovation and excellence. Additionally, our loan repayment program and practice support loans provide our graduates with the financial resources to make career choices that follow their passions.

Overlook Family Medicine Residency Program was established in 1973, four years after the birth of our specialty. Our mission is to provide high quality, evidence-based education to our learners and compassionate, cost-effective, evidence-based services to patients and families. 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. As a regional medical center located just 20 miles from New York City and affiliated with Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Overlook provides all the services of a larger university-based program in the atmosphere of a smaller, community setting. Our residents get the best of both worlds – a multi-residency training environment with advanced technologies in a setting where family medicine is respected and embraced. In fact, Atlantic Health has been rated as one of “100 Best Companies to Work For®” by Fortune Magazine – highlighting our high quality, high touch attitude towards heath care delivery.

In addition to learning the full spectrum of family medicine in an academically challenging and supportive environment, our program offers several learning tracks and opportunities not often found elsewhere:

• Palliative Care – an area of concentration with both didactic and clinical experiences, including participation in palliative care: team consults, weekly interdisciplinary team meetings, inpatient rounds; monthly Schwartz Center Rounds; monthly bioethics committee meetings; and participation in hospice team meetings and home visits; among other activities.
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• Sports Medicine – an area of program concentration with a weekly sports injury clinic, a monthly rehabilitation/sports medicine clinic, procedure workshops, and sideline management experiences.
  
  
• Medical Humanities – a 100 hour certificate program in collaboration with Drew University offering learning opportunities in ethics, medical narrative and the arts, and patient centered communication.
  
  
• Global Health – provides 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.
  • Benjamin H. Josephson MD Fund
  • Shoulder to Shoulder
  • Mount Sinai School of Medicine : Global Health Residency Track

As a resident at Overlook Hospital you will have the opportunity to explore your own personal and professional interests. We are especially proud of our graduates, many of whom have gone on to be leaders in our specialty. Our graduates have entered fellowships in 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. Yet others have chosen careers in medical management or industry, and several of them have established practices in international settings.

Whatever your interests include, our staff and faculty are here to provide you with an atmosphere of camaraderie, intellectual challenge, innovation and guidance as you train to become a culturally competent, clinically astute, highly compassionate family physician.

We look forward to meeting you.