Melissa Eidman, MPH, a 2023 Pisacano Scholar, is a 4th-year medical student and Knight-Hennessy scholar at Stanford School of Medicine and is a member of the Yurok Tribe of Northern California committed to primary care in rural and urban Native American communities.

From community college in Sacramento, she transferred to Stanford University where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in human biology with a concentration in Native American community health. As an undergraduate, Melissa served the Native community through research and planning, earning awards for her commitment to public service and excellence in undergraduate research.

Awarded the John Gardner Leadership in Public Service fellowship, Melissa continued her service with the Native community through her work at the Sacramento Native American Health Center and the California Consortium for Urban Indian Health before returning to Stanford for her medical degree. Committed to improving Native American health outcomes, in these roles, she planned and launched Tribal MAT–a program developed to address the opioid epidemic in California’s rural and Urban Indian communities and lead efforts to integrate a traditional healer into the primary care setting.

In 2022, she was awarded a Zuckerman Fellowship and earned an MPH in Quantitative Methods from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. As a medical and MPH student, Melissa continues to advocate for Native communities through her research and work with admissions and recruitment. Beyond returning to the Native community as a family medicine doctor and obstetrician, Melissa aspires to be a leader and advocate for underrepresented and underserved communities, reducing harm for those with substance use disorder, and improving the health and health care of indigenous peoples across the U.S. and around the globe.

Alongside medicine and public service, Melissa is passionate about the pursuit and maintenance of individual wellness. She is rejuvenated by time spent at home on the Yurok Reservation and with family and friends–seeing live shows, going on road trips, and traveling up and down the West Coast to cheer for her partner at his softball tournaments.

Raymond Tsai, one of our PCPH graduates was honored by The Primary Care Collaborative. Raymond’s passion for improving America’s primary care system comes from the knowledge that a strong primary care base leads to a more robust overall health care system and his longstanding experience working with primary care.

(Inset pic) Raymond Tsai, MD

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Frontiers in Medicine is a broad-scope, multidisciplinary journal covering all established medical disciplines to improve clinical practice and patient care. "Training future clinicians in telehealth competencies: outcomes of a telehealth curriculum and teleOSCEs at an academic medical center" authored by Rika Bajra 1*, Malathi Srinivasan 2, Elise Cheng Torres 1, Tracy Rydel 1 and Erika Schillinger.  This study describes the program and learning outcomes of a telehealth skills curriculum based on the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) telehealth competencies for clerkship-level medical students.

Read the full article here

Cureus, the open access medical science journal platform published “Making It Work”: A Preliminary Mixed Methods Study of Rural Trauma Care Access and Resources in New Mexico”, a research paper submitted by Anna Carroll, MD.

Full article here

Touch, and the Absence of it.  

We would like to share a wonderful essay written and submitted to The Lancet essay contest by Dr. Shireen Heidari.

Click here to view Dr. Heidari's essay