BY JEN A. MILLER | ILLUSTRATION: BRENDAN TOTTEN
Meet some of the newly minted MDs choosing to stay in the Ocean State.
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When Abigail Dillon, MD, was deciding where she was going to practice after completing her residency in family medicine, she had a few options. She grew up in Philadelphia and went to medical school there and she loved the region, but half of her family is in New England.
She spent her academic career here too. She earned her undergraduate degree at Boston College and then, in a gap year between college and medical school, worked for the Brown University School of Public Health, where she collaborated with her uncle, who is now retired; and after medical school she trained in the Brown Family Medicine Residency Program.( Medical residency is a period of supervised, hands-on training in a specific specialty that physicians complete after graduating from medical school.) But even in deciding to stay in New England, Dillon had to choose between Rhode Island, which she had fallen in love with, and Massachusetts, where doctors earn about 30 percent more money.
“ It came down to the fact that I had my son here, and I felt like during residency, we found a great community,” she says of herself and her husband. She’ s now a family medicine specialist at Brown Health Medical Group Primary Care and assistant professor of family medicine at Brown.
Keeping doctors in Rhode Island, especially primary care physicians, is a persistent problem, says Kelly McGarry, MD, professor of medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School and program director of the General Internal Medicine Residency Program at Rhode Island Hospital.
Some factors behind it are national, like lower pay rates for primary care; and others local, like lower reimbursement rates to Rhode Island practitioners compared to other New England states.“ Why would they stay when leaving might get their loans paid sooner?” McGarry says.
But they do stay, and Brown is working on pushing for reforms that would make the state more attractive for new primary care doctors, which include family medicine, pediatrics, adult medicine, geriatrics, and internal medicine specialists. They want to recruit more local students to go to school here, too.
For graduates of Brown residency programs, it comes down to community, family, and wanting to make a difference in a patient population that they’ ve learned to know and love.“ When we have people stay, it’ s largely because they value the culture,” McGarry says.
THE PRIMARY CARE GAP A lack of primary care physicians is a nationwide problem. While these doctors have traditionally been the first stop when someone had a medical problem, more than 100 million Americans don’ t have easy access to primary care, according to a National Association of Community Health Centers report. The same group also found that the number of Americans who can’ t access primary care because there aren’ t enough local physicians doubled from 2014 to 2023. It’ s a worsening problem too: The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortage of between 20,200 and 40,400 primary care physicians by 2036.
According to HealthSource RI, 15 percent of Rhode Islanders are unable to get a primary care appointment at a convenient time. That’ s up from 11.2 percent in 2022. The Rhode Island Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner also found that the situation is worse for low-income households and for Hispanic adults, with one-third reporting not having a usual source of care.
Despite this persistent problem, there isn’ t an easy fix. Nationally, primary care doctors make less than physicians in other specialties. According to the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, in 2024 a doctor practicing orthopedics earned $ 564,000 a year, and a plastic surgeon earned $ 544,000. In comparison, a family medicine doctor made $ 281,000. That’ s not an insignificant difference when the average medical student graduates with more than
FALL 2026 l HEALTH DISCOVERIES @ BROWN 17