Family Medicine Mentor Brings Broad Perspective to RLS, RPS
March 6, 2025, David Mitchell — Bryan Hodge, D.O., has made a career of caring for the people of Southern Appalachia while training students, residents and fellows to do the same. The St. Louis native found his calling to serve the underserved not in rural Missouri but in multiple, far-flung points on the globe.
It started with a high school service trip to Honduras.
“I recognized that if you don’t have the opportunity to get health care it changes the trajectory for your life,” he said. “In rural Honduras, I saw clinicians doing full-scope care. I tied that directly back to family medicine, which allows you to provide the majority of the care your community needs. I applied to medical school thinking I was going to be a family doc.”
First, Hodge returned to Honduras as an undergraduate student. He later had similar experiences during a medical school trip to Africa and a trip to Guatemala during residency.
“I was really shaped by global medicine,” said Hodge, a graduate of the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in Missouri and the Exempla St. Joseph Family Medicine Residency Program in Denver. “I did have an ‘aha’ moment when I realized you don’t have to travel outside of the country to see people who have significant needs. During medical school and residency, I worked in a lot of free clinics that cared for populations that were uninsured or unable to afford care. I was tremendously inspired by the physicians who were doing that work.”
Hodge started his career at a federally qualified health center in his native St. Louis, but since 2010 he has been affiliated with the Mountain Area Health Education Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina, filling a wide variety of roles. Hodge has cared for patients in rural North Carolina while also preparing students, residents and fellows to become their physicians.
“My passion is figuring out how to provide basic, essential primary care for people who need it the most, and how to do it in a way that is impactful, meaningful and allows them to live healthy lives,” he said. “It’s more than just building residency programs. It’s understanding how to train physicians well.”
Hodge has been an attending at Margaret R. Pardee Memorial Hospital in Hendersonville since 2010, a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina since 2014, and is longtime faculty at two of MAHEC’s three family medicine residency programs, as well as chair of its Department of Community and Public Health.
He served as an assistant program director and director for the Hendersonville family medicine residency before starting the Boone residency program in 2019. Since 2024, he’s been the chief academic officer for MAHEC, overseeing the training of 218 residents and fellows in more than a dozen programs. The health system cares for roughly 50,000 patients in more than a dozen counties with about 250,000 patient visits per year.
MAHEC exposes students and residents to rural experiences with the hope that they will practice in the region long term, Hodge said. It also gives physicians practicing in rural facilities opportunities to teach while they do so.
In addition to family medicine, MAHEC has residency programs for dentistry, general surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pharmacy, psychiatry, surgery, and a transitional-year program. It also has fellowships in addiction medicine, critical care, maternal-fetal medicine, child and adolescent psychiatry, and sports medicine.
“I think the reason I ended up landing in this role is because I was involved with every program and trying to create rural opportunities for surgeons, psychiatrists and others,” said Hodge, who previously directed MAHEC’s Center for Health Professions Education and its Rural Health Initiative. “I have a broad knowledge base for the ACGME and other specialties, and a passion for interprofessional and interspecialty training. Often, the specialties and residency programs see themselves in competition with one another. Actually, we’re all on the same team. Once you graduate, you better be on the same team to take care of the communities we’re serving.”
Hodge didn’t need another role, but he’s been a consultant for the AAFP’s Residency Program Solutions since 2019.
“I’ve been in many AAFP venues, and it’s always felt like home because I’m surrounded by people who inspire me to be better,” he said. “Residency Program Solutions allows me to help programs create the outcomes that they desire both for their program and their communities. There’s no shortage of challenges in primary care or in building graduate medical education programs and workforce initiatives. We’re in this together, and RPS gives me a vehicle to help other programs, mentor leaders in other parts of the country, learn from other programs, figure out how we can enhance our programs across the board, and be a part of that conversation.”
With nearly two dozen experts to choose from, RPS pairs residency programs with consultants who have expertise that fits a program’s needs. For example, Hodge works with new programs, rural programs and teaching health centers.
“There’s a lot of power in having someone’s perspective from outside your institution to reflect on,” he said. “What is your program doing well? We give you best practices, what other programs are doing, and really challenge you to continue to achieve excellence within your program both for the clinical services that you’re delivering and education.”
RPS will mark its 50th anniversary during the Residency Leadership Summit March 25-27 in Kansas City, Missouri. RPS consultants will offer guidance March 24 during the ABFM SOAR/RPS PreConference. Registration is available online. Consultants also will be available for free 20-minute one-on-one consults March 25-27. Residency programs can sign up for that service on site.
On March 26, Hodge will present a session regarding an online residency assessment tool related to the Criteria for Excellence, the publication RPS consultants update each year with benchmarks, best practices and guidance for all the major aspects of running a residency program.
“This session is meant to empower program directors to evaluate their program, assess where they may have opportunities for improvement, and give them guidance on how to accomplish their goals and utilize resources from the AAFP, like the Criteria for Excellence,” he said.