VERMONT — An Addison County physician recently received a grant to keep her practicing in Vermont.
HealthFirst, Vermont’s independent practice association, has partnered with the Broughton Fund and the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine Area Health Education Centers to provide Educational Loan Repayment (ELR) Community Match Grants to HealthFirst member practices seeking to hire new physicians or retain current physicians.
Over the this year and last, community grant funds of $50,000 have been earmarked to assist physicians with educational loan repayment. The recipients of the 2019 ELR Community Match Grants are:
Dr. Katie Casas Miller, MD, FACOG, of Middlebury Family Health; Dr. Leslie Lockridge, MD, of Northeast Kingdom Hematology/Oncology in Newport; and Williston’s Thomas Chittenden Health Center (which will use the grant to attract another health care provider).
Dr. Miller grew up in a big family in rural Maine and attended Grinnell College in Iowa, where she majored in Anthropology and Biochemistry. She always wanted to be a doctor, but she also loves to explore and to learn about different cultures, so she spent several years traveling abroad and living in New York City before attending medical school at UVM Larner College of Medicine.
Miller completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, then returned to Vermont. She said she is very happy to be practicing at Middlebury Family Health, closer to her New England family and friends.
She lives in Weybridge with her husband and two daughters, and loves working with plants, cooking, baking and spending quality time with the people she loves.
Area Health Education Centers administers the ELR program on behalf of the state of Vermont.
Independent physicians play a key role in the health care landscape, and the goal of this collaboration is to strengthen the primary care physician workforce and private practice model, and to ensure, through recruitment and retention, an adequate supply of doctors to meet the health care needs of Vermonters.