Butler Family Medicine Residency charts the future for Butler healthcare
Butler Family Medicine Residency’s ribbon-cutting went beyond welcoming guests to the updated East Jefferson Street facility, it also opened its doors to the future of Butler County’s medical education.
The new facility houses eight residents — four welcomed July 1, 2025, and four to start July 1, 2026 — to help close the growing need for the county’s primary care physicians.
The space includes 21 exam rooms organized into four clinical pods, two osteopathic manipulative treatment rooms, a procedure room, a precepting office, a lactation room, laboratory space and medication and vaccination storage.
The 8-8-8, Clinic First model welcomes eight new residents every year after the first two cohorts and allows for more time and quality interaction for both patients and residents, which makes healthcare more accessible, according to Dr. Joe Dougherty, program director.
With the motto the “clinic is the curriculum,” Butler Family Medicine aims to allow residents to get experience by doing.
“I knew I would be confident in my skills leaving this program whenever we’re done,” second-year resident Dr. Lauren Duttry said. “In our first year, we see almost enough outpatient encounters to fulfill our entire residency. The recommended number that we’re supposed to see, we’ve nearly made that count in just our first year.”
In 2020, Butler Memorial Hospital did a community needs assessment and discovered a significant portion of its primary care physicians were going to be at retirement age, Dougherty said.
As one third of physicians nationally will stay local to wherever they graduated from, Butler Family Medicine Residency’s program strives to train and welcome the next generation of Butler County primary care physicians.
Second-year resident Amba Pasupuleti expressed excitement at the opportunity to “shape the curriculum;” whereas second-year resident and eldest of six brothers Dr. JC Eddis took the next class under his wing, helping them navigate the maze of the facility and showing them where the clean sheets and coffee are housed.
I “consider the concept of get in where you fit it,” Eddis said. “After I’ve interviewed at 35 different places, I felt like the people that I met here, I had a lot in common with. There were some shared morals and values where I thought I could practice medicine the way that I would like to.”
The program is broken into two tracks: a Butler track and a rural-Clarion track. After the first year of residency, physicians either join the Butler division or the rural-Clarion division, depending on what they indicated on their application.
If Independence Health System is officially acquired by West Virginia University Medicine, Dougherty said the acquisition would do nothing but benefit the Butler Family Medicine residency program.
“WVU does rural medicine extraordinarily well,” Dougherty who is a graduate of WVU’s medical program himself, said. “The fact that they’re coming in, they’re able to put some financial resources, some personnel resources with us will certainly make this program stronger.”
Additional features of the new East Jefferson facility include an updated kitchen, eight faculty offices and administrative space. Renovations included new flooring, furniture, lighting, electrical upgrades, fresh paint and replacement ceiling tiles, Independence Health marketing and media relations specialist Melissa Forster said in a news release.
