Congratulations to Dr. Bill Phillips and colleagues Jeongyoung Park, PhD, and Michael Topmiller, PhD. Their paper, “Pathways to primary care: charting trajectories from medical school graduation through specialty training,” published in Health Affairs, was named 2026 Research Paper of the Year by the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM).
This award recognizes a research paper published in a peer-reviewed journal between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025. The STFM Research Committee bases the award selection on the quality of the research and its impact.
The award was announced at the STFM annual meeting in New Orleans, May 3rd, 2026.
When the paper was originally published last year, UW Medicine highlighted it in Peeling back stats behind U.S. primary-care shortage.
The key findings of the paper include:
- The US has a persistent shortage of primary care physicians everywhere all the time. This primary care shortage, threatens personal and public health.
- Upon graduation from medical school physicians can choose one of three specialties that can lead to a career in primary care: Family Medicine, and Internal Medicine and Pediatrics.
- Medical school Deans have long told the “Dean’s lie” to their universities, communities, and state legislatures: They count all these groups as primary care physicians, even though they know that many of these physicians choose subspecialty careers and never go to primary care.
- This paper introduces a new measure – the Primary Care Yield (PCY) – that tells a truer story of the paths taken by US medical school graduates and it answers the question by marshalling comprehensive nationwide data on all US medical school graduates and international medical graduates.
- Family Medicine residency training is the most direct route and highest yield specialty for producing primary care physicians to meet the needs of patients, families, communities, and the nation.
- The Primary Care Yield is 97.0 percent for family medicine, 35.5 percent for internal medicine, and 54.4 percent for pediatrics.
Dr. Phillips conducted this study with coauthors Jeongyoung Park and Michael Topmiller, while serving as Larry Green Visiting Scholar at the Robert Graham Center, Washington, D.C.
The Health Affairs paper is available via free access throughout May 2026.