Soon-to-be-graduate hopes to deliver primary care to rural communities

Fueled by his faith, Chip Chambers, a fifth-year M.D./M.B.A. student in the Perelman School of Medicine and Wharton School, has always looked for ways to serve.

“My faith is a huge motivator of everything that I do. I just believe that I’ve been blessed with a lot of things that I didn’t earn and that I have a responsibility to steward those for the good of other people and not for myself,” Chambers says.

He grew up in a tight-knit family in the small rural town of Watkinsville, Georgia, where he was home schooled from kindergarten through high school—an experience that Chambers says gave him good time-management and independent-learning skills—before going to the University of Georgia to major in biology and economics, with a minor in health policy and management.

“My background is rather unique both at the med school and at Wharton in many different respects: growing up in a rural area, being home schooled growing up, and even going to a state school,” Chambers says.

On the pre-med track, Chambers sought out the opportunity to volunteer at Mercy Health Center throughout his time at the University of Georgia, which is where he found his passion for primary care and the overall health care system.

“I started on the pre-med track and gradually, over time, became more certain that I wanted to become a physician,” he says. “But at the same time, I developed an interest in the health care delivery system itself.”

At Mercy Health Center, “I saw that the primary care doctors were really able to make a difference in people’s lives when stars aligned to the health care system. And so that experience got me passionate, both about primary care and about the health care system.”

He chose Penn Medicine because, in addition to providing clinical training—the “backbone of medical education”—that is “second to none,” Penn also offered the opportunity to earn his M.B.A. in just one additional year and to learn skills such as point-of-care ultrasound that will be of particular use to him as a family physician in a rural area.

“Ultrasound, in contrast to other imaging modalities like CT or X-ray, is radiation-free and portable. You can put an ultrasound probe in your pocket and fly around the globe or go to rural areas, as I'm interested in, and image people,” Chambers says. “It’s real time, so you don’t get a static image; you can actually have people do dynamic movements or do procedures and make them ultrasound-guided, and it’s cheap and affordable. So, it’s the epitome of high-value care.”

And he was able to accomplish the three goals he had for himself when he entered Wharton: learn the technical business skills like accounting, improve on his people skills, and understand “how the American health care system itself works.”

“If I want to design a better primary care system—the one that’s better for my patients and that doesn’t burn me out—I have to be able to manage and work with people effectively and get people united behind a common vision.”

Jeffrey Millstein, clinical assistant professor of medicine, agrees. “From day one of our first-year primary care mentoring sessions, it was clear to me that Chip has equal zeal for becoming an excellent clinician and improving our health system,” he says.

“There are many things wrong with the American health care system, and chief among them, I would argue, is how poorly we manage chronic disease,” Chambers says. “If we are going to have a solution to the health care system, it has to start with primary care.”

As Chambers explains, his interest lies in developing better payment models for primary care in the hope that “if we change the incentives and empower doctors to take better care of people preventatively, we might be able to keep people healthier and lower health care costs in the process.”

But primary care also offers Chambers the opportunity to build relationships and make connections, something that he consistently seeks to do in his own life, including the strong bonds he made at his church in Philadelphia’s Germantown section.

“It’s a small church with people with very diverse backgrounds. Most people don’t look like me or aren’t in higher education, but it’s a community of people who really love each other. Those are probably going to be the hardest goodbyes for me over the next month,” he says.

Chambers will be doing a residency in family medicine at Self Regional Healthcare in Greenwood, South Carolina, a rural community just an hour and a half away from his hometown, and is excited to begin his career in primary care.

“For me, my why—my true north—has always been really clear. It’s to take the gifts and blessings that I have and leverage them for other people who have been structurally marginalized, and I think that primary care is a clear application of that.” 

Jennifer Kogan, senior associate dean of undergraduate medical education at the Perelman School of Medicine, says Chambers “is unwavering in his commitment to improve the lives of others. I have no doubt that he will be an outstanding family medicine physician and will be highly sought out by patients.”

In an email shared with Kogan by a colleague who had connected Chambers to an internship at Hopscotch, a primary care clinic with a mission “to transform lives in rural communities through accessible and proactive value-based care,” Chambers writes, “I really appreciate it and hope I can pay it forward. Let’s keep unbreaking the system for patients regardless of where they live.”