Dr. Bowman has devoted his career to delivering health access and improvements in health access.
- He began with four years as a solo rural physician in Nowata, OK. He spent another four years as the rural outreach director at East Tennessee State working to develop rural medical education programs and helping to coordinate recruitment and retention efforts between ETSU and the Tennessee and Virginia Primary Care Associations.
- He was selected as a Public Health Service Primary Care Policy Fellow after nomination by the National Rural Health Association.
- He spent the last 15 years working with the Nebraska Office of Rural Health Policy to help coordinate recruitment and retention across medical education, family practice residency training, rural rotations, and recruitment fairs.
- His efforts brought national recognition to the state’s medical education and rural graduate medical education programs from the National Rural Health Association and the Public Health Service.
- As with most family medicine medical educators devoted to outreach, he continued to deliver health care to rural or inner city populations in Tennessee and in Nebraska.
- He currently is working at the School of Osteopathic Medicine Arizona, a medical school model that takes medical education in an entirely different direction compared to the past 100 years of specialization and physician concentration. The model selects and trains medical students for health access careers with the final three years of training based in rural and urban Community Health Center settings. Only the nation’s adverse health policies separate these medical students from health access careers. An adaptation to a 10 year family practice obligation to cover medical school costs may even overcome this greatest barrier to health access.
- His research continues to add clarity to neglected health access workforce studies. His Standard Primary Care Year measuring tool brings common sense understanding by identifying primary care training that actually results in primary care delivery as opposed to those with limited primary care and health access contributions. A second tool is the Physician Distribution by Concentration coding tool that maps physicians by zip code concentrations. This health access tool demonstrates what we know from common sense, that 65% of the nation’s population is currently left behind in the current health care design.
- These are tools that document that “They Really Do Go” regarding those found in rural and in underserved locations.
- He also serves as the North American Regional Co-Editor for Rural and Remote Health, the international e-Journal.
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