Resident Leader Ready to Hit the Ground Running

“That’s pretty awesome,” said Klinker, who will complete his training at the OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio in June. “Being able to give back to my friends and family and having the opportunity to be a doctor in my community really was appealing to me. I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity.”

When Klinker received the AAFP’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Medical Education last August, local media outlets published that news along with the fact that the resident already had a job waiting at OhioHealth’s medical offices in Van Wert and Rockford.

Klinker knows his way around both facilities. He shadowed physicians in both towns through a pre-medical experience program he created for himself and others between his first and second years as an undergraduate at Ohio State. In his program, students spent four weeks volunteering through the Red Cross and had four weeks of shadowing experience.

“I’m familiar with nearly every provider in town,” he said. “I’m familiar with all the different offices and my network of local specialists. I was even on the planning team for the Van Wert North building during my gap year.”

“I was honored they actually made a position for me,” said Klinker, a graduate of the University of Toledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences. “There were a lot of transitions happening at the hospital that year.  We were getting a new EMR. We were building a new ambulatory care center. We were rebranding, so they knew I could put my hands in lots of different buckets. It was an awesome year because I got to do a lot of things students and residents don’t typically do, working with the C-suite of a hospital, learning the business aspect of medicine, working in marketing and project management, as well as clinical things.”

Klinker has some big plans for his new practice. A cross-country runner and baseball player in high school, he hopes to serve as a team doctor for his former school. He also has talked to the director of the parks department, who happens to be his cousin, about potentially starting a Walk With a Doc program.

“I’m hoping to be really engaged in the community,” said Klinker, who plans to practice community-focused and evidence-based family medicine. “I’m also contemplating a health education series. I feel like that’s a really important resource we could provide, especially in smaller town that doesn’t have access to as many resources as a bigger city.”

Klinker already has leadership experience. He was the resident member of the Ohio AFP’s Board of Directors in 2022-23, and he was a regional coordinator of the AAFP’s Family Medicine Interest Group Network the previous year.

“A lot of people don’t know how awesome family medicine is, so I wanted to try to increase the growth of our specialty and be an advocate for it,” he said. “Being an AAFP FMIG leader gave me the ability to have outreach to a bigger area. There were more than 30 med schools in my region. I was frequently in communication with them, sharing strategies to promote the specialty and to get news and resources out from the AAFP. That was a great opportunity to promote the specialty that I love so much.