Oregon Health & Science University OHSU Health Cascades East Program

Program Identity & Fit

Cascades East is a rural, community-embedded family medicine program administered by OHSU in partnership with Sky Lakes Medical Center in Klamath Falls, built explicitly around training comprehensive, procedurally broad family physicians for underserved rural and frontier practice. The curriculum is distinctive for its emphasis on full-scope rural scope-of-practice—maternity care, hospital medicine, ICU, procedural medicine, and a dedicated Emergency Medicine Track with ATLS certification and trauma team leadership—paired with a longitudinal HALO-focused simulation curriculum preparing residents for high-acuity, low-occurrence rural emergencies. Residents rotate through frontier communities (John Day, Enterprise, Sitka, Lakeview) and additional Oregon sites for NICU, pediatrics, and ICU exposure, and can choose tracks emphasizing maternity, hospital medicine, or ambulatory care. Research is not the program's core identity, but resident-led innovation (POCUS curriculum, culinary medicine, published trauma-training outcomes study) and mandatory leadership roles on hospital/community committees signal that the program values physicians who will build and lead within their rural communities rather than pursue subspecialization.