Transcript:

I'm Joe Austin and I'm the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for the Phoebe Health System.

What does a residency mean for hospital like ours?  Well two or three things.  One it means access to care.  We have a very large residency program family care center here and we provide access to numerous people around the community and it's not only benefiting our community but it’s benefiting the young physicians in training.  Something else that I think is very important is that the drive to watch cost of care and the environment we're living in right now we all know that everyone's financially challenged right now and part of our job as a healthcare system is to help drive healthcare cost down.

The new residents that are now in training with us part of their education is to look at how do I minimize the cost of care for the patient I'm taking care of and that's what you're looking for in the future.  We want bright young physicians that are not only attuned to great medical care but also attuned to how do I minimize a patient's bill in the future.

A third point I'll make that is critical I think is if you look at the history of this program and the number of the residents that have graduated from this program over the last ten or 15 years is the fact that 60 percent of the students that have finished our program are staying within 60 miles of this hospital.  And what that means is access to care again.  And if we look at the healthcare field and number of physicians available in the market right now we know that there will be a huge demand in the future for primary care physicians.  The numbers are growing because we all know I'm one of those guys, I'm a baby boomer, as I age out I need a good primary care physician and we know there are not enough primary care physicians in the market now and so that number will -- that gap will spread in the future.

So anything we can do to contribute to add in to the primary care market right now, physician market, I think is a worthwhile cause.  And so we're glad to have a resident here, we're glad that our physicians and our staff will be involved in training and we're really glad most of them decide to stay close to Albany in the future.