Populations First

Kate LaRiviere, MD ’25, had an “aha” moment when her personal life intersected with her medical education. A Population Health Scholar in the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine, LaRiviere had spent several years working with her Intermountain Health mentor, Audrey Jiricko, MD, on quality improvement projects addressing intimate partner violence and sexual assault. In her third year of medical school, she began working with children during well-child visits as part of her pediatric Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship (LIC) and offering parents anticipatory guidance—conversations guided by topics important for the children’s health and relevant to their stage of life. At home, her teenager had started dating, and LaRiviere began thinking about how to help her daughter recognize signs of unhealthy versus healthy relationships.

“This program was built with long-term outcomes in mind.”

“When I was a sexual-assault crisis counselor, we were dealing with the aftermath of sexual assault and intimate partner violence,” LaRiviere said. “I started to think about not only how we improve health care’s response to these kinds of things, but how we help prevent them in the first place.”

One possible answer, LaRiviere suggested to Jiricko, was to offer anticipatory guidance about healthy relationship building during adolescent well-visits and equip parents with the tools they needed to talk to their teenagers before they entered the world of dating.

LaRiviere took her idea to her pediatric LIC attending, Intermountain pediatrician Neal Davis, MD, who arranged for LaRiviere to offer a presentation on the topic during a monthly pediatrician meeting. LaRiviere garnered enough support and feedback to initiate work with Davis on a protocol for a research project. Now, she and Davis are awaiting Institutional Review Board approval to gather data on the effects of educating parents and their teens on how to develop healthy relationships.

It’s an experience that LaRiviere says was made possible through the Intermountain Population Health Scholars program, a unique partnership between U of U Health and Intermountain, established in 2021.

“One of the beautiful things about the Population Health Scholars program was being in a position to make changes in how the medical system approaches intimate partner violence,” LaRiviere said. “Dr. Davis was quick to connect me with people who were interested in pushing these ideas forward. As a Population Health Scholar, you have those resources right at your fingertips.”

LaRiviere is among 11 Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine students who were accepted into the inaugural cohort for the Intermountain Population Health Scholars program.

“This program was built with long-term outcomes in mind,” said Taylor Dean, associate director of the Population Health Scholars program in the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine. “Our first cohort may be headed out of medical school and into residency, but we view that as the next component of the program and their careers with Intermountain to serve our community.”

The brainchild of former A. Lorris Betz Senior Vice President for Health Sciences and CEO of University of Utah Health Michael Good, MD, and former Intermountain Health CEO Mark Harrison, MD, the Intermountain Population Health Scholars program is the first of its kind—merging the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine’s education experience with Intermountain’s patient care to benefit local communities.

The nationwide physician shortage is especially prevalent in rural areas as well as in underserved and urban communities. Utah ranks 47th in the nation for primary care physicians per capita, and in some counties in the Intermountain region, there are no physicians from whom to seek care. The program aims to address this by not only immersing students in clinics, but also decreasing the burden of student debt and promising future employment if, after residency, the scholar returns to work as an Intermountain physician in one of six specialties: family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, general surgery, psychiatry, or pediatrics.

“Intermountain created a $50 million endowment to the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine that established this program,” Dean says. “The funds are used for medical student education, providing students half of their program tuition and fees.”

Along the way, students also receive a population health certificate through the University of Utah.

“Population health takes a whole-person view—looking at patients beyond their disease or chronic condition,” explained Karyn Springer, MD ’98, assistant vice president over medical education for Intermountain Health and assistant dean for Intermountain Population Health Clinical Learning at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine. “Treating a patient through the lens of population health, the physician addresses both the reason for the visit and ways to close important care gaps, including recommended cancer and other screenings, that would help benefit the patient’s overall health.”

“The collaboration between a state academic center and a community-based health system is truly unique. We both focus on addressing our community’s needs.”

Population health also prompts physicians to consider the social determinants of health. For instance, Springer explained, physicians assess whether patients are experiencing food insecurity and how that might impact their care. This perspective encourages doctors to think about how these factors extend into the broader community.

“While I can address the needs of the individual patient in front of me, it’s important to acknowledge that the community is much bigger,” Springer said. “How can we effectively collaborate with payers, health systems, and state agencies to enhance the well-being of the entire community?”

And equipping future physicians with the skills needed to approach patient care through the lens of population health is the express goal of this first-of-its-kind partnership.   

“The collaboration between a state academic center and a community-based health system is truly unique,” Springer said. “We both focus on addressing our community’s needs. We each bring distinct strengths that complement the other—and we recognize that neither of us can address these needs alone as well as we can together.”