With first graduate, accelerated UW Med School program aggressively takes on physician shortage in rural Wisconsin

On May 9, he will become the first graduate of a program at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health that reduces the time it takes to train doctors interested in serving rural parts of the state. Students in the accelerated program take all the same required courses but graduate in three years instead of four through a combination of factors. For instance, the summer between the first and second years of medical school is traditionally open; these students fill it by immediately jumping into their second-year clinical rotations. The students also have fewer requirements for elective courses, especially those around career exploration, since they've already landed on their career path.

The short-track program is a new offering of the Medical School's Wisconsin Academy for Rural Medicine, known as WARM, which has been successfully addressing the physician shortage in rural areas since 2007. As of this May, WARM will have graduated 327 students. In the past, roughly three-quarters of the graduates have returned to Wisconsin post-residency, with 42% practicing in rural areas.

"There's a significant geographic disconnect in Wisconsin between where people live and where doctors practice," says Dr. Joseph Holt, WARM's director. "As high as 31 percent of the state's residents live in rural areas, yet only one in 10 physicians practice in these rural areas. It's imperative that we address this problem because the rural physician shortage is only going to increase as current physicians retire and the population ages."

It would be hard to take the country out of Hoffman. Growing up, he raised beef cattle and showed them at the county fair. He got his first snowmobile as a pre-teen and now owns several. He shot his first buck at 12, then another at 13, and another at 14.

"Each time, it was the first bullet - one shot and done," says his father, Brian Hoffman, a heavy-equipment operator. "I was very proud of him for that."