FUTURE: 3 physicians discuss their journey to family medicine

Anthony Okolo, MD, summarized it succinctly: “You have to know who you are,” he said. “You know what you love and you know what brings you fulfillment. And that's the most rewarding thing.”

The Friday afternoon event appeared on the schedules of the thousands of FUTURE attendees as a session titled, “Careers in Family Medicine: When (and How) I Knew Family Medicine was for Me.” Moderated by Margot Savoy, MD, MPH, CPE, FAAFP—Chief Medical Officer for the AAFP—the panel featured intriguing insights from Okolo as well as Chase Mussard, MD, and Anita Ravi, MD, MPH, MSHP, FAAFP, as they discussed their careers.  

"Understand your why:” Dr. Okolo and staying true to yourself

Okolo’s path to family medicine started when he was in high school, and Okolo can even pinpoint (with reasonable accuracy) when and where it was: in high school with his mom. “I think it was the summer of 11th grade,” Okolo said. “She’s a nurse. And so I signed up for this volunteer program where I could accompany her.”

From that experience, Okolo learned the beginnings of patient-centric care. In college and medical school, he was inspired by just how omnipresent and patient-focused family physicians were. “Whether it was in the emergency room, whether it was even the ICU, whether it was inpatient settings, [family physicians] were everywhere, Okolo said. “Who else follows patients before they’re ill, while they’re ill and after they’re ill?”

Okolo keeps himself busy. He’s the medical director of the NYC Health + Hospitals Accountable Care Organization. He’s also an attending physician in the adult primary care department at Kings County Hospital in New York City. He got to his current position by following, as he puts it, his “why.” Why are you pursuing what you are pursuing? Does your line of work line up with what you value? For Okolo, family medicine aligns with his “why.”

"Why not us?” Dr. Mussard and full-spectrum care  

Growing up in rural Tennessee, Mussard knew just about everyone in town. After residency in Portland, Oregon, Mussard returned to rural Tennessee to practice family medicine, where it turns out that physician life was not much different than it was before he was a family physician. “It’s odd because now I see patients, and they friend me on Facebook,” Mussard mused. “Now I see patients all the time and I’m like, ‘Oh, you know my cousin, my brother, a family member.’”

While family physicians by nature usually treat a broad range of patients, that is doubly true for rural doctors. For Mussard, that was something he actively embraced. Mussard valued educational experiences that gave him training across the full spectrum of family medicine, and he sought a special focus on full-scope maternity care—including surgical obstetrics.

Mussard chose this path in part because he wanted to respond to the trust given to him by patients to help make them better—not just then and there but throughout the coming months and years. “Once you become a physician, it's an immense privilege. I mean, patients give us so much trust from day one,” he said. “And I think I wanted to do a job that I was going to be able to honor that trust in the long haul.”

For Mussard, there was only one specialty that could help him achieve what he wanted. “You can do so much in family medicine. And for me, when I was looking around to what was happening in the world and in my communities, no matter what happens, I always saw family medicine in the center.”

"Justice in this work:” Dr. Ravi and medicine as a social good

Ravi’s passion couldn’t be clearer. That’s true on paper, as the organization Ravi founded, the PurpLE Health Foundation, is building the first health care organization specifically for survivors of gender-based violence. It was also apparent listening to her animatedly talk about a variety of subjects from her interest in jail and prison health care to the clock-drawing psychiatric test.

So it may be of a bit of a shock that becoming a doctor or a physician was not Ravi’s first instinct. “I didn’t know I even wanted to be a doctor,” she said. “I majored in German. . . . I wanted to be a professional tennis player.” Ravi was interested in medicine broadly, but she just didn’t think it lined up with her values until she met some key people in her life. “I just got really lucky meeting people who just took the time to listen to what I cared about and found ways to help me imagine broader,” she said.

For Ravi, justice is the throughline permeating all of her work and intertwined within the entire field. “It is a just specialty,” Ravi said about family medicine. “If you care about social justice, you care about ethics, this is the place to be. Because you understand the whole ecosystem, what care looks like, what humanity looks like and what your role is in it.”