Program Director Welcome Letter
Welcome to the Oklahoma State University Internal Medicine Residency Program in Tulsa, Oklahoma!
It is my pleasure as Program Director to introduce you to what our program has to offer. As most things, the best predictor of the future is the past.
Our program was founded in 1954 and is proud to be based at OSU Medical Center, which is one of two remaining historically osteopathic training hospitals left in the country. Our residents have gone on to pursue every imaginable career that is rooted in the foundation of a strong internal medicine backbone. This includes outpatient medicine, hospital-based medicine and fellowships in cardiology, nephrology, infectious disease, gastroenterology, pulmonary/critical care, rheumatology, hematology/oncology, endocrine and palliative care. Our outpatient doctors and hospitalists line the fabric of our city and are coveted by all the major health systems in our area.
The absolute best part of our program is the people. Every individual who touches our program is vetted thoroughly. That begins by surrounding our residents with faculty who are passionate about medical education and serving the needs of our trainees. It continues by seeking residents who are simply amazing human beings. We prioritize empathy, kindness, curiosity and selflessness when interviewing applicants. Our perspective is that the best doctors tend to be those that listen the best, care the most and advocate the hardest for their patients. Once those attributes are in place, teaching medicine becomes the easy part of the equation.
At OSU, our patient population is widely diverse. We serve as a tertiary care center and the referrals into our system allow our residents to see almost every imaginable pathology. In addition to the high number of referrals from our rural communities, we also benefit from serving the Ryan White HIV Clinic as a portion of our continuity clinic. This exposes our residents to over 2,000 HIV patients in Northeastern Oklahoma and gives them an advantage over other graduates after they complete their residency. In addition to the HIV population, our residents also serve our veterans at the Muskogee VA. Between the VA experience and our Intensive Care Unit at OSU Medical Center, our residents quickly become procedurally adept and are able to train other residents on central venous catheters, arterial lines, intubations, bone marrow biopsies, lumbar punctures, thoracentesis and paracentesis by the completion of their residency.
One last thought I would like to leave you with is that our program's success is measured by the success of our residents. Our wins and losses are shared. That feeling permeates our residency because at the end of the day we are family.
Thank you for your consideration of our program, and if there are any other questions we can answer for you that are not answered by our website, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,
Program Director