Family medicine residency

The Corewell Health - Grand Rapids/Michigan State University Family Medicine Residency is a three-year program accepting six residents per year. We provide residents with the unique experience of training in both urban and rural settings, preparing them to practice in a wide range of locations and meet the needs of their communities.

Our residency is ACGME accredited with a board pass rate above the national average. Our graduates have gone on to pursue a broad range of careers in family medicine, from primary care, hospitalist medicine, full spectrum family medicine with obstetric care, academic medicine, urgent care and subspecialty fellowships.

Our program’s mission is to provide excellent and comprehensive patient-centered care by focusing on the continuous search for knowledge, the health of the communities we serve, and the well-being of the patients, their families and ourselves. To live this mission, we need strong primary care doctors who can take care of patients from all walks of life. Our residency was designed with this goal in mind. We aim to provide a robust educational experience where our residents get to train in the “best of both worlds.” In Greenville, the residents work in an unopposed setting. As the only residents in Greenville, they develop a sense of community and autonomy while learning how to practice in a small, rural setting. In the Corewell Health Grand Rapids Hospitals, they rotate with residents and fellows from other residency programs. They learn how to work as part of a complex medical education team in a major tertiary care center and how to navigate the complexities of caring for patients in a large healthcare system.

Another highlight is our program’s close affiliation with Michigan State University. This provides us with access to academic research and educational resources usually not available to smaller community programs. It is also a great opportunity for residents to develop leadership skills while working with medical students.

Residents also enjoy our Culinary Medicine Curriculum. This hands-on cooking and nutrition course allows them to explore the medical aspects of various disease processes while cooking together. Residents learn how to incorporate healthy eating into their own lives so they can help teach their patients and communities as they move into future practice. Eating the delicious food at the end of class is another bonus!

As our program has grown, we have adapted to meet the needs of our communities. We have added the Lifestyle Medicine Curriculum, Mel Trotter Street Medicine Clinic, Medication Assisted Treatment of opiate addiction, Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy, Vasectomy Clinic and more!

I encourage you to explore our website and submit your application during this interview season.

Robin O’Meara, MD, Vaccine Science Fellow-AAFP
Family Medicine Residency Program Director
Corewell Health - Grand Rapids/ Michigan State University College of Human Medicine

The structure of our program has residents rotating at two main Corewell Health locations—Butterworth Hospital and Corewell Health Helen DeVos Children's Hospital (part of Corewell Health Grand Rapids Hospitals) and Corewell Health Greenville Hospital. For size comparison Butterworth Hospital has 634 beds and Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital has 242 beds, while Corewell Health Greenville Hospital has 42 beds.

In addition, there are two outpatient continuity clinic sites, adjacent to each hospital in both Grand Rapids and Greenville. The Grand Rapids continuity clinic is an urban clinic with most residents from Grand Rapids and includes a large immigrant population. The Greenville Hospital clinic is a certified rural health center. Each resident sees patients at one continuity clinic for the duration of their residency.

Our program is a medium-sized, university-affiliated community program with six residents accepted per year, for a total of 18 residents. Corewell Health in West Michigan's large medical education system provides support for medical education initiatives systemwide in resident wellness, diversity and research.

Corewell Health Greenville Hospital

• 49 acute-care beds and 39 long-term-care beds
• Walk-In clinic
• Heart and vascular care
• Orthopedics
• Wound care

Continuity clinics

All residents will rotate through the nursing home. In each class, there will be three residents who will have clinic at the Corewell Health Butterworth Hospital (part of Corewell Health Grand Rapids Hospitals) clinic and three residents who will have their clinic at the Corewell Health Greenville Hospital clinic.

We strive to make every resident and faculty member at Corewell Health feel valued and respected. We are committed to fostering and advancing inclusion and diversity in our workforce, workplace, leadership, faculty and programs. We believe in equity for everyone.

The Grand Rapids clinic serves a racially diverse group of patients: 45% White/Caucasian with 14% of these patients identifying as Hispanic, 32 % Black/African American, 9% Mixed race, 3% Asian, 1% Native American/Alaska Native. We work with the Kent County Health Department to be a primary care clinic for many of the refugee patients in Grand Rapids. Our clinic uses the most translation services within our health system to communicate with our patients in over thirty languages including: Spanish, Kinyarwanda, Swahili, Burmese, Arabic, Dari, Tigrinya, and Karen.

We provide gender affirming care for transgender and gender diverse patients in both clinics.

We are dedicated to ongoing efforts that advance our values of diversity, equity and inclusion for all residents and faculty within our program. These range from small groups during didactics that develop cultural intelligence to our systemwide inclusion resource groups for people to find community and empowerment at work. We invite those that share in these values to join our team. In addition, we invite medical students to learn more about our Minority Visiting Scholars Program (see visiting learners website).

Click here to see our resident and fellow focused initiatives and events.

Patient care and resident education is provided on-site in the lifestyle medicine practice's state-of-the-art teaching kitchen clinic and via telehealth visits. Core programs include culinary medicine, intensive therapeutic lifestyle change programs, tobacco and nicotine cessation and health coaching. The integration of the lifestyle medicine residency curriculum within the family medicine residency program provides a unique opportunity for residents to learn and apply lifestyle-first approaches to care of patients in both rural and urban communities. This also allows residents to get an additional board certification in lifestyle medicine upon graduation.

Kristi Artz, MD, Medical Director of lifestyle medicine, and Nicholas Stephanoff, MD, work collaboratively with Brian Wilder, DO (Lifestyle medicine certified and core faculty) to implement the LMRC at Spectrum Health. Drs. Artz, Wilder and Stephanoff are members of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, certified by the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine and grateful for the opportunity to participate in lifestyle medicine education as the foundation of true healthcare. Residents will have the opportunity to obtain lifestyle med board certification and/or scholarships.

Thank you for interest in our program. The following criteria is required for application to the family medicine residency program. For more information on our program, contact our program coordinator Elizabeth LaRouche.

• All applicants must participant in the National Resident Matching Program. Our code is: 2077120C1.
• All applications will be accepted through the Electronic Residency Application Service.
• All candidates must possess U.S. work authorization or be eligible for J-1 status.
• Graduation from medical school should be within three years or you should be recently clinically active in the practice of medicine. Research time and observerships do not qualify as clinical involvement.
• We require three letters of recommendation plus a dean’s letter.
• Applicants must be eligible to be licensed in all 50 states and United States territories as demonstrated by: graduation from a Liaison Committee on Medical Education fully-accredited medical school or graduation from an American Osteopathic Association/Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation fully-accredited medical school.

Information for international medical graduates

• A valid Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates certification for rank by February 1.
• Applicants must have received all their medical school education from and graduated from a medical school recognized or approved by the Medical Board of California. The medical school’s name must exactly match the name on the board’s list of recognized medical schools.

Candidates should aim for the passing USMLE/COMLEX testing on the first attempt.

• All scores for part 1 and 2 must be in prior to February 1 or candidate may  not be ranked.

Visiting learners

All visiting medical student applications must be submitted through the visiting student learning opportunities program (formerly known as VSAS). For more information on visiting medical student opportunities, please visit our visiting learner page. We do accept MS4 electives for current medical students. We do not offer observerships or externships.

Corewell Health in West Michigan provides a comprehensive and very competitive benefits package for our residents, staff and their families. In addition, our program provides educational monies to support your ongoing education. Download our salary and benefits document to learn more.