Peter J. Koopman, MD, FAAFP
Candidate for director
Personal statement
I am proud of my decades of work as a family medicine doctor.
The breadth of my family medicine experience and my enthusiasm for our specialty's essential importance to improving health care in this country will inform my service on the AAFP Board of Directors. As a former small-town family doctor, former outpatient-only family doctor and current academic family doctor, I will bring value to all discussions and deliberations of the AAFP board and the essential work the organization does to support defending our scope of practice, growing our pipeline and reducing administrative burden. The AAFP is our strongest voice to advocate for the value of our specialty.
My experience in health care delivery and patient care is diverse, even if my personal demographic is not.
Geographically I have lived and practiced for significant parts of my life in the Northeast, the South and the Midwest. I completed my residency training in family medicine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, then began practicing as a family physician in the rural Florida panhandle, then served a suburban community in Charleston, South Carolina, via urgent care and outpatient-only care. Now I’ve served 20 years in the Midwest state of Missouri in Columbia as an academic clinical family physician leader and educator. These unique roles have provided me with a diverse set of perspectives on the different responsibilities and job environments in which a family physician can serve, and have allowed me to give more well-rounded and experienced advice when I work with students and residents. This diversity of my family medicine experiences would be valuable to the AAFP board.
I believe family medicine is key to the sustainability of our health care system.
Overwhelming data exists to support the claim that family medicine and primary care need to be more respected and valued. The issues are broad and interconnected but come down to making our health care system recognize and value the essential importance that family medicine contributes to a functioning, equitable and efficient healthcare system for our country. The AAFP has done great advocacy work to these ends. The AAFP also works to grow the primary care workforce. We need more family doctors in our country who understand and recognize and receive their worth. I am aligned with AAFP’s mission.
I am committed to advocacy for the family medicine profession.
My academic work reinforces my commitment to my advocacy for the importance of the specialty I love every day, and I have also invested deeply in the Missouri Academy of Family Physicians (MAFP) in the last 20 years. I have served on our executive committee and regularly advocate at state and local levels. In my advocacy roles, I prioritize mentoring students and residents in the importance of family medicine and health care advocacy. I feel honored that many of the students and residents I have mentored have gone on to leadership roles within the MAFP and AAFP. I have given over 30 educational presentations at Missouri Academy and national conferences, and many more for residents and students.
Compassionate family physician, innovative family medicine educator, dedicated mentor and fierce legislative advocate for fellow practicing family physicians, Peter Jacob Koopman, MD, FAAFP, is a 1992 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. He completed residency training in family medicine in Pittsburgh in 1996. During the 10 years after residency, he practiced family medicine full-time in Florida and South Carolina in both rural and urban settings before hearing a call to academics. In 2007 he joined the faculty of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and in 2010 he completed a six-month fellowship in teaching and learning at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.
Dr. Koopman is currently a professor of clinical family and community medicine at Mizzou. He maintains an active, busy patient practice in Columbia, Missouri, in a suburban office with 11 other family physicians. He also is an integral part of residency and medical student education, and has been informal and formal mentor to numerous residents and students over the last 20 years. He is co-director of an eight-week course for first-year medical students called “Introduction to Patient-Centered Care,” and has served as the elective director for Mizzou’s family medicine clerkship. He just completed his second three-year term on the Admission Committee for MU’s School of Medicine. He is a former chair of the Admission Committee and currently serves on the Curriculum Committee. He received the Outstanding Clinical Faculty Teaching Award in 2013 and the Outstanding Clerkship Curriculum Innovation Award in 2019 from the MU School of Medicine.
In addition to his academic duties at Mizzou, Dr. Koopman is active in statewide and national family medicine organizations and advocacy for the profession. He currently serves as co-chair of the Missouri Academy of Family Physicians Advocacy Committee, where he has served for seven years. He is past president of the Missouri Academy and serves as one of the two Missouri delegates to the American Academy of Family Physicians Congress of Delegates. He received the MAFP Distinguished Service Award in 2022.
Nationally, he is past chair of the AAFP’s Commission on Federal and State Policy, and regularly travels to Washington, D.C., to advocate for family medicine patients, public health and our country’s commitment to preventive and public health. He is an AAFP delegate to the American Medical Association House of Delegates and the AAFP member on the Academic Family Medicine Advocacy Council. He was named a Fellow of the AAFP in 2014.
Dr. Koopman’s wife, Richelle, is also a family physician and is chair of Mizzou’s Department of Family and Community Medicine. They married in 1990 during medical school. They have two children: Ian, 27, currently living and working as a teacher in Boston; and Katie, 21, an undergraduate student studying animal sciences at Mizzou. Dr. Koopman tries to spend most of his time away from work with his family. He is an enthusiastic fan of all things Disney and loves to play the guitar.