{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/4q7qn6152z/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. Jason Marker"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine.  Disclaimer: The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker’s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice. \u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2020-11-09 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral History"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Annette Routon (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["Video file"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["Family Medicine","Family Physician","American Academy of Family Physicians"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Jason Marker, MD (personal name)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English (primary)"]}}],"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine. \u0026nbsp;Disclaimer: The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker\u0026rsquo;s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/295/863/small/JasonMarker%2811-9-2020%29.mp4_1761141451.jpg?1761141452","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - Jason_Marker_(11-9-2020).mp4"]},"duration":2805.96,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/295/863/small/JasonMarker%2811-9-2020%29.mp4_1761141451.jpg?1761141452","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/295/863/original/Jason_Marker_%2811-9-2020%29.mp4?1761141451","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":2805.96,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863/transcript/85499","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Dr. Jason Marker interview transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863/transcript/85499/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Annette Routon: Good afternoon Jason. To confirm for the record please that you are aware that this is being recorded and you have signed the consent form with the Center for the History of Family Medicine, and you are giving your permission or have given your permission to do this interview on Monday, November 9th, via WebEx.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Are those four of the 16 questions already? We are going to get done really fast if that's true. I have yes answers to all of those. Those are all true.\n\nAnnette Routon: Okay. All the above. Okay, well then we're getting started. Here we go. We're going to start easy I think. Jason, where do you currently work and what is your title?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I am an Associate Director of the Memorial Hospital Family Medicine Residency training program at Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana. And I've been working here for three and a half years. Before that, I spent 15 years in a small, solo, rural, private practice.\n\nAnnette Routon: When and where were you born?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Well, I was born in Mishawaka, Indiana, which is just about 10 miles away from here, probably less actually. And with high school here, went away for college in medical school, but came back here for residency. So this has been my home base for all but those eight years of my life.\n\nAnnette Routon: Okay. Tell me about your family; your wife Kirsten and your three daughters.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: My wife and I went to high school together. There were two middle schools in our school district and she went to the other one, so I did not know her at middle school, but she did have my father for seventh grade science which was a very great class for her. She went on to become a seventh grade science teacher herself. So we met up in high school in the band program and started dating in high school, went to IU in Bloomington, Indiana together. She got her education degree. I got my biology degree. We were married before the start of our senior year. Lived off campus, went to Indianapolis for medical school where she taught until we started raising our family.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: We had two babies in medical school and one more in residency and those three girls are now moving in the direction of being out of our house. Our oldest daughter will get married in February. Our middle daughter finished her astrophysics degree from the University of Arizona and is applying for medical school but lives in Huntsville, Alabama, working at the US Space \u0026 Rocket Center. And our youngest daughter is a junior at Valparaiso University with a double major in astronomy and meteorology. So she's still technically at home but where her future leads probably will lead further away than Northern Indiana.\n\nAnnette Routon: So you shared where you went to college. I think you might've said where you went to residency. Can you share then elaborate. I think you said it, but maybe briefly.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Sure. Do you want a fun story about that too or do you just want the boring facts?\n\nAnnette Routon: Yes!\n\nDr. Jason Marker: There are two residency programs here in South Bend area and I of course was interested in both of them because I wanted to come back home again. So I arranged as many rotations as I could in my third and fourth year of medical school up here in South Bend and split that time between the two different residency programs so I can really get to know them, which was fine. When I was in the interview process, Kirsten and I were hardly sure I was going to get to go to the residency of my choice and actually engaged a contractor to start building us a home in South Bend before I'd even matched in South Bend, which looking back was either really reckless or really arrogant of me, probably a little dose of both.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: But when we finally did match in South Bend, then the first person we called was not either of our parents. It was the contractor to tell him that we were coming up that weekend and we'd go to the bank and finalize those arrangements so he could start getting paid for the house that he was already building for us. Then we came home and I did a few more rotations after match day and went back down for graduation. I was sitting in the back row of graduation with some of my family medicine minded friends who were also matching with me at Memorial Hospital.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: One of them leaned over to me and she said, \"At Memorial, they've got that brand new four year [inaudible","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863#t=0.0,298.0"},{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863/transcript/85499/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"] includes a master's degree in public affairs, which sucker do you think they got to do that program?\" And I said, \"I am that sucker. That's me.\" I was the first four year graduate from this program. I got a master's degree from Indiana University, South Bend, while I was a resident in public affairs, which was basically geared for future physician leaders to know about how healthcare systems worked. And it was part of a four year curriculum that included blocks of management training in addition to my regular doctor training along the way.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: After my 15 years in private practice and coming back into the faculty pool, one of my jobs is as the advisor to that program. And so our residents that are coming through that program today do that with some guidance on my part, which is really fun for me as the inaugural alumni of that program.\n\nAnnette Routon: Oh, very cool. That's very cool. Okay. Let's talk about your decision to go into family medicine. Why family medicine?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Why family medicine? I don't know. I'm kind of a people person as much as you can be as an introvert. I like building relationships with folks longitudinally over time. Not in the wild, crazy let's go hit the bars sort of way, but in the I like to get to know what makes you tick sort of way so I can do a good job for you. I was really drawn to emergency medicine at one point in medical school because of the breadth of information that you needed to know, but quickly, like most students discover, wanted that long-term relationship. And getting them fixed and patched up and back out on the street doesn't give you that feedback usually in emergency medicine.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: And I surprisingly liked urology. I had a growing interest in geriatrics and men's health and so urology seemed to be a field where there was a lot of geriatric and men's health and could have seen myself doing that. It's got just enough surgery to excite me, but not as much as being a general surgeon. In the end, I just didn't want to isolate my scope of work down to urology. So family medicine was. I had great family medicine mentors in medical school, did some great rotations with folks who really solidified for me that that's what my future needed to be.\n\nAnnette Routon: Okay. After completing your residency at Memorial Hospital, why did you decide to open your practice?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I really like autonomy. It's not that I bristle at being told what to do, but I thought ordering a private practice would be an intriguing thing to do. Even by 2002 standards, opening your own practice was a little bit archaic to do that, but I was interested in the business of medicine. I wanted that flexibility to come home, to go to work after I got a volleyball schedule from one of my daughters and just go in and book out all those afternoons so that I could be at those games for her and not have anybody tell me that I couldn't do that. And I wanted to be engaged in leadership and professional membership organization work without anybody telling me that I couldn't do that.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I had been involved with the Indiana Academy of Family Physicians all through medical school and wanted to plan on continuing to do that. They wanted me to do more things with the AAFP and with them as well. And going into private practice seemed like the way to do that. I was close to joining a group practice in a nearby community, but the process of me being in medical school were bought by another entity that was not as excited about having me join their practice.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: That entity didn't feel like they had squeezed enough work out of them on their own yet, let alone bringing in a new partner. So I picked the location where there an older doctor retiring and I bought his practice and was still able to practice with the other doctors I had been interested in joining, but just not as a direct member of their group. So I got the autonomy I wanted and got to use my leadership and business skills right off the bat out of residency.\n\nAnnette Routon: Cool. Okay. Well, let's shift gears and talk about serving as past AAFP board of directors new physician, past president of the Indiana Academy of Family Physicians, Indiana delegate for the AAFP Congress of Delegates, as well as other board positions. In what ways have these elected positions shaped you as a family physician and leader?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I was always taught by my parents that you weren't allowed to complain about something not working right if you weren't willing to roll up your sleeves and do something that was part of making it work better. And because I could see that there were things that were changing in family medicine that not everybody liked and that were certainly not great for my patients, I was eager to continue some leadership work that I had begun as a medical student with the Indiana Academy of Family Physicians. And sort of as happens, one thing led to another. So I got involved, I got taught and trained and mentored up by a lot of amazingly good family doctors here in Indiana. And one of the things that they showed me was places where you can be even more involved and learn a few more things which opens the door to more involvement in other areas.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I was at the National Conference of Students... No, that's not what I was at. I was at what is now NCCL, National Conference of Constituency Leaders, and ACLF, that's not what it was called at the time. And I was there as Indiana's new physician delegate to that conference. And that's the conference where they select who would be on the board of directors as the new physician member of the AAFP board of directors. I watched one year and saw how that was going and who they were picking and what the skillset of those people were and kind of read a little bit more about it and thought to myself, well, that would be pretty interesting to be on the AAFP board of directors.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: So I went the next year prepared to run for that and was successful in that bid. I had a wonderful year working with the AAFP on the board of directors. Got to meet amazing group of family doctors who to this day many of whom I stay in touch with and are mentors in the work that I do and who I've asked to do things for me in my new leadership goals along the way as well. And towards the end of my year on the AAFP board of directors, Craig Doane, a great friend of mine who at the time was the executive director of AAFP Foundation approached me and said, \"Well, you've really done some great work on our board of directors. But it's clear that you have a passion for things that are related to what we do on the foundation side and I wonder if you'd be open to being nominated as a trustee for the AAFP Foundation,\" which I thought was great because one year was just not enough to satiate my appetite for national leadership work in an organization that I just loved what they were doing.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: And so the next year then I transitioned into a board of trustees position with the foundation, and that was great. Right away I found great friends and a wonderful home for my skillset and was able to contribute at a high level pretty early on in my time on the board and made it clear that I would be interested in entering the leadership track for the executive track of the foundation when the time was right to do that.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I was aided along the way by past presidents before me who encouraged me to do some things that would help me be more prepared for that and then enter that track. I find that I often get asked and have become reasonably good at doing governance work. We were in need of some governance restructuring along the way and got to help with that and got to begin to launch some new programs from the ground up that were being developed during my time on the trustees.\n\nAnnette Routon: Well, you kind of answered my eight and nine question since you kind of went into your involvement with the foundation. Can you just tell everyone what year you were president?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: No. No, I can't tell you that. Might've been-\n\nAnnette Routon: 2015.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I was going to say '15, but okay.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: 2015. I was president. And I think I had maybe been on the board for three or four years before that. I can't remember if I ran out of sync or in sync. But I ran and then was in the midst of restructuring what the early executive pool looked like. We went from three positions of two years each to four positions of one year each to begin to cycle folks through the trustees and the leadership roles a little bit more quickly because third, it quite honestly was a group of folks who not exclusively but to a certain extent had failed in their bid to be president elect of the AAFP.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: That was sort of the way things were that that's how you rolled into the foundation board. And we saw the need for newer, younger leadership that was not coming through that pipeline, but through a pipeline directly into the foundation. And we needed to move faster than a six year leadership pool of officers. So we restructured it in that way. My wife reminds me that it would be uncommon that a person would do something that would disenfranchise them from the longest term possible in politics. But yet that is what I did.\n\nAnnette Routon: Okay. Besides the Family Medicine Leads, which we'll talk about soon of course, can you reflect on some of the high points of being the president of the AAFP Foundation?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I traveled a lot. I do love traveling. It's one of the things that I miss most in the COVID times. I like a good hotel room and we don't have cable TV out in the country where I live, so it's nice to have that. I get to go and really concentrate without distraction on a different part of medicine and use a different part of my brain. And I did an awful lot of traveling my year as the president. Some of that I did more than was absolutely required of me because I wanted to and enjoyed that and had many opportunities to do it and said yes more than some past presidents had.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: So that was a highlight for me getting to go all over the country and meeting other family doctors who were engaged in things that our foundation found really engaging, whether it was going and talking to people that we wanted to be on our board in the future and seeing what their business was all about, whether it was meeting people at free clinics and handing them an award and patting them on the back for a job well done on behalf of the foundation, whether it was scouting out sites for international work to the foundation to put its resources into, whether it was going to places that were running grant programs that were flowing through the foundation but that I could have a chance to be at their annual meeting and thank them for their work, even though we were just sort of floating money through our organization for them to do that good work. The travel was remarkable and I loved it very much.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: The other thing that I guess I will call out is the opportunity, as I said before, to be involved in changing the face of the foundation and how it worked from a governance standpoint. So not just the change in the sort of the structure of how we work people through that organization, but I was allowed to look at some data to help us in a process of right-sizing the foundation. Long before anybody said it was a great idea, we knew it was a good idea to look at the diversity of our membership and make sure that the diversity of our board matched that.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: And other people came along behind me and really finished that work. But I'd spent a lot of years working with the right people at the Academy who let me see some data that is not generally available, specifically because they knew I had my heart in the right place to make sure that the foundation was doing all that it could to be the kind of organization that our members needed it to be. I'm very proud of at least being able to launch that work in addition to what involvement I was able to have with family medicine leads.\n\nAnnette Routon: So then as past president, how has it impacted your growth as a leader physician and educator?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Not that I was lacking in self-confidence before my time with the foundation or the Academy, but I think it gave me a nice boost that I did have some skills and some competence around leadership and the ability and willingness to open that box of skills up in other areas of my life. Some people spend a lot of time in their local community before they do anything at the state, and they work at the state level for a long time before they do something at the national level. I've sort of turned that upside down, which is weird and sometimes requires some different mentoring which I'm blessed to have had along the way.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I did a few things at the state, but then stepped up into the national leadership before really coming back down into the state and local work that I'm now doing. And that's fine. The work that I did with the foundation and the Academy informed what I'm doing now and gave me that boost of self-assurance that I was doing it for the right reasons and that the things that I was doing at the local level do feed up to the national level when they're done the right way.\n\nAnnette Routon: Okay. Before your presidency and during, you spearheaded the launch of the education signature program, Family Medicine Leads, specifically the Emerging Leader Institute. Can you talk more about that and the significance of this program?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: The foundation was involved in discovering what a signature program in each of its three major pillars of work were going to be. The work around Family Medicine Cares was pretty well underway by that time I joined the foundation and I did get to be involved in it as I was working my way through the officer positions. But that was being led very capably by others before I got onto the scene. And I'm not much of a researcher. I had a sense that I was going to get tapped to lead either the education initiative or the research initiative and I certainly did not want to lead the research initiative. So when they were asking who might be interested in helping lead some small task groups to begin thinking about the education signature program, I heartily volunteered partly out of self-preservation about not wanting to get stuck at the other arm. That's just the honest truth about how that first got started.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: But then of course once I got involved in that, it was very, very exciting. I've done a lot of teaching. I had been doing a lot of teaching in my private practice, which I was still in at the time. And my parents and family members are all educators. And so it seemed like a good fit for me to be involved in this. And it turns out based on my upbringing and what I heard around my dining room table my whole life, I have a lot of really good ideas about how education could and should be done in different areas. And so I was pleased to be engaged in that process and that surprisingly, since that was coming to fruition as I was working towards the presidency of the foundation, I was very, very pleased to see that that was going to launch during the time that I was an officer and could be really a big part of seeing that through to its finish.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Of course we had wonderful board members coming and going through our cycles at that time. I've told the story before, but I very distinctly remember a time when we had probably a couple of years of conversation about what an educational signature program was going to be. We had several pretty decent ideas about what it could be. We had a resident member of the foundation board of trustees, Jessica, whose name escapes me right now, who basically raised her hand in a meeting and I called on her and she said, \"Well, here's what I think would be great as a resident.\" In a few phrases, she sort of laid out on the table the initial framework of what would become the Emerging Leader Institute.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: And it got another year, year and a half of work before we really had a final program. But I was excited to be at the table to invite a resident to speak on something that really they should have had the biggest voice in and then build a program around that vision. And that's sort of how that program took off, became what it is.\n\nAnnette Routon: And so what do you feel about, like what is the significance of it then? Do you feel like it was bigger when you were going through it, or do you feel like now as you, after your presidency, you continue to volunteer as the Family Medicine co-chair, which ended this year, but then looking back, I mean, how has the program evolved from its launch in 2015 to now?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Well, I'm nothing if not a meticulous planner of things. And so I guess I would say that the program is becoming mostly what I thought it would become, certainly what I hoped it would become. It has continued to evolve. But it's evolved in ways that were not entirely unpredictable by those of us who were working on what it would look like from the start. There were some parts of it that didn't work well that I have not forgotten and would like to circle back around someday and see rebuilt. Maybe that'll happen, maybe that won't. There are parts of it that worked even better than we thought they would. And some things that need to change just because the world we live in has changed along the way as well, and that's fine. I think we've capably made those adjustments as we've needed to.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I believe that there was a core group of us who thought to ourselves and whispered quietly to one another, \"This is going to be amazing,\" even before we had the first class. And now we look at each other and sort of wink and say, \"Yeah, it is amazing. And we knew it was going to be.\" But I think there were reasons why it could have fallen apart as well. But I think there was such a commitment by our donors and our staff leadership and the board itself that we were able to quickly deal with any issues, if you will, that could have come up along the way and keep ourselves on track for these first five years of the program. It's great. It really has done what we hoped it would do for the Academy and helped launch a lot of careers in family medicine leadership based on what we're seeing from the alumni of the program.\n\nAnnette Routon: Absolutely. All right. So 2017 was a big year of change for you. You were in private practice for 15 years before accepting a position at the Memorial Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program in South Bend, Indiana. Can you speak to the transition or why you were ready for this opportunity?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: 2017, our last of three daughters was wrapping up with high school. My private practice was thriving and very mature. And that mature is not always a good thing in family medicine. It means most of what I was seeing was, well, people at a good handle on what their issues were and what I needed to do to keep them well and spending most of my time doing wellness care, squelching down the occasional medical problem that cropped up for a patient. And I began thinking about the direction that my career was going in and not that I was dissatisfied with that direction, but wondering what the next big thing was going to be.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I'd wrapped up my time on the foundation. I was doing some things at the state level but looking for sort of another challenge. And really as I thought a lot about that, I had basically two options in front of me. One is that I was going to make some sort of fairly radical change in the care delivery model that I was using in my rural private practice. And I would have been keen to do that. Many people already told me that I was essentially doing direct primary care concierge medicine in a fee-for-service environment. And I was working hard with the organization, Family Medicine for America's Health on practice transformation principles. So I was learning a lot about that.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: And so option one was to look for a new practice model. Staying in my rural community but to find some different way to do that. I'd already been experimenting. I brought in a part-time partner for a time, hired a nurse practitioner for a little while. These are things I really didn't need to do. Those were not really smart financial decisions on my part, but I wanted to experiment with those models to see what I could learn from them. And so that was really one option for me.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: The other option was to go a different road. And for several years, my wife had been saying to me like, \"You love it every time there's a resident in your office. Aren't there other places you can go where you can do teaching all the time?\" Not that she wanted to see me out of my private practice either, but she just recognized that those were my most joyful days when I had residents around me learning from what I was doing in practice. And there was humongous value to having them near me in my private practice to do teaching in that way.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: But then I got a phone call from the program director at my residency program where I'm an alumni from. He happened to be a resident a couple of years ahead of me, so I knew him from our days as resident. He'd been in the faculty pool there at the residency program for a few years and had become their program director. And he was letting me know that one of my mentor and faculty members was going to retire, and whether now might be a time for me to consider a move to full-time teaching.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: And over a few months of time, he and I had some conversations about that and in the end Kirsten and I thought about it and prayed about it and decided that maybe now was the time for that kind of transition. We're not ones to just sort of say that the way it is now is the way it always has to be. I've always sort of thought that there will be several chapters to my career along the way and full-time teaching in a residency program ad all of the amazing things I get to do that are part of that has become a really exciting second chapter in my career as a family doctor.\n\nAnnette Routon: We're almost done, almost done. Just a couple more questions. You've recently become involved with another leadership development program for the AAFP. Can you share more about the program and what is your role.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Sure. One of my good who's your buddies is Dr. Clif Knight who has really mentored me through my professional leadership growth along the way and I've gotten to see him make a lot of transitions in his career as well. Most recently his transition into a leadership role within the AAFP which is exciting for me to watch him do but also exciting for what could be a part of my future sometime too. And so he and I talk about that quite a lot and he knows my interest in those kinds of things. I have a good understanding of who each other is as a person, as a mission and husband and father and those kinds of things.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: He and I had a conversation related to the Emerging Leader Institute where he'd let me know that there were some rumblings about a leadership development program that would be on the Academy side as opposed to the foundation side where I'd been doing most of my work. He wondered if I was interested in hearing more about that as the program began to develop and I said that I would be. I mean, how can you say no to that? Of course I'm interested in hearing more about it.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: And then there was probably about six months where there was really not any conversation about that, and that's fine. I thought maybe that idea died on the vine or maybe any number of things happened, but then out of the blue one day I got a phone call from Clif who wanted to talk to me more about that and began to tell me about this grant that had been procured for a leadership development program, but not just any leadership development program, one that was specifically geared to physician wellbeing. And as a mid-career physician, I'll tell you, I'm very interested in that. There've been times in my career where I would say I've struggled with my own wellbeing and priority setting and those kinds of things.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I've done my own bit of work around that. I think all family doctors do or should do along the way. And so I said, \"Tell me more.\" And he told me a little more, and then we had another conversation. I said, \"Tell me a little more,\" and as he began to tell me more about his vision for the program, I thought to myself, well, that's the AAFP version of the Emerging Leader Institute, excuse me, very much. So I thought, okay, well, I can roll with that. Plus nothing I did on the foundation is proprietary work of course.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: And so one thing led to another and he said, \"I'd really like you to take the lead on this program. We're going to help resource you with some dedicated employees at the Academy to help this roll out the way it needs to and we're going to help you identify some faculty members. We hope you'll be one as well, but we're looking for an administrator who can help administer this program from a physician leadership standpoint who also knows things about wellbeing and performance improvement and leadership development.\" And so that's what we're doing. We're in the midst of writing the educational program right now. I've been allowed the flexibility to surround myself with amazing, amazing people. Not just at the Academy, but the co-faculty that will lead with me along this program.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I think it's exciting. At the Emerging Leader Institute we have 30 spots to fill and we sometimes get four to six times that many applicants for our slots. And with the Leading Physician Well-being program, we've got a hundred slots to fill. And in this first go around, we've had four to six times that many applicants with the program, and it's structured in some ways similarly to what we've done. What's exciting to me is as I talk with folks about my vision for the Leading Physician Well-being program, I bring up ideas that they hadn't thought about before. And I think that's great that a physician leader gets a chance to weigh in on what a program structure looks like and not just we'd like you to give this lecture, here's what it has to be about. But tell us how you think this could work as a physician leader in your own right and help us develop this program not just we've developed it, you need to teach it. And that's a great thing the Academy's always done at least in programs that I've been a part of.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: So, that's what it's going to be. Wellbeing, physician leadership development and performance improvement education for physicians who are primarily for seven years in practice, underrepresented in medicine, especially women, and those who are in ownership structures where they heretofore have not had much say in what is decided around them. And that excites me to no end that that is our target audience because it's a target audience that I've been trying to keep on the forefront of the Academy's work for a decade.\n\nAnnette Routon: Wow. Yeah. I guess on a side note, I got an email from, is her name Heather Woods, is that the administrator?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Yes, Heather Woods.\n\nAnnette Routon: I heard that she had spoken to you and she'd asked for the non-winter response email. And of course I shared it with her and she said that y'all received like 500 applications or something like that. So it's very good.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Yeah. It's pretty exciting to have almost 600 applications come in for a 100 person program. Yeah, there's a grant. They don't have to pay what they would normally pay for it, but we are going to build an amazing leadership development program around wellbeing that I think will potentially save physician lives, certainly will make them more valuable to their home communities and unleash what we know is inside all of those doctors on communities that are going to be excited to see the new smile on their doctor's face who now feel so much more invested in the community around them. It's going to be great.\n\nAnnette Routon: And just for, I guess for me, I'd read something on it, but for the Emerging Leader Institute, like the alumni person, what is the criteria? Like how far are you in your career that you could apply for this, the Academy's leadership development program.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: There is actually a tiny bit of overlap in the Venn diagrams of potential applicants for these two programs. We can take applications from residents for the Leading Physician Well-being program. We think that'll be a very small number of our total applicant pool. And I say I don't know, from Heather Woods, how many residents would have applied to this one already. But then the bar is pretty low. I mean, really if you are in your first seven years, actually any member can apply to the Leading Physician Well-being program. We are prioritizing folks in their first seven years of practice and some of these other subgroups of our membership, but anybody can apply. So there's lots of reasons why the alumni from the Emerging Leader Institute may want to do this.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Now, the Emerging Leader Institute being designed specifically for leadership development skills to expand the pathway towards leadership for medical students and residents, that's not the same end goal as Leading Physician Well-being which is about building out a leadership toolbox specifically around spreading the message of physician wellbeing using a performance improvement scaffolding. And so there may be some people who are alumni of the Emerging Leader Institute who want to move on to that. But the outcomes are different enough that there may not be that much overlap either.\n\nAnnette Routon: Okay. So something else to promote, just curious.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Yeah.\n\nAnnette Routon: All right. This is a bonus question and I kind of hesitated. I was going to put it in. So anyway, I put it in. So you've spent your entire academic and professional career in Indiana. Was that a planned decision? Did you ever consider moving out of state for your undergrad or residency training? I've always been interested. I was going through just all, like your undergrad [inaudible","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863#t=298.0,2257.0"},{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863/transcript/85499/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"], your whole life just seem like you've been in Indiana. So I just wondered if there was ever a time you're like, maybe I'll go to California or, I don't know, Idaho. I don't know. I'm just sort of interested I guess.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Well, let me answer this fairly broadly. If it's my last question that I get to answer, let me answer it fairly broadly. I have wonderful parents, wonderful parents, and I dragged them up to Northwestern to look at colleges and I dragged them out to Baltimore to look at Johns Hopkins. And we drove down to Bloomington, Indiana and looked at Indiana University School of Medicine. I did a lot of reading and sort of soul searching around that. Somehow I had it in my head that it would be easier to get into medical school if you'd gone to a big name undergraduate and for what it's worth, I was a high school valedictorian.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: So I was thinking fairly broadly about where my college career would take me. But in the end as I was really thinking about what I wanted my life to look like, I just sort of decided that I just didn't need to spend all of those dollars at these prestigious places, especially if family medicine was going to be where I landed. That amazing family doctors from the Heartland do sometimes go to those higher prestige places, but how can you argue against the fact that I have met all of these wonderful doctors here in the Midwest who have stayed in the Midwest and why can't I be one of those and also save some money and make a smart financial decision along the way as well.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: So I went to IU in Bloomington and I got my biology degree. So then it comes to medical school and I think, okay, well, now I'm married and my family is all in Indiana. My wife's family is in Missouri actually at the time, but from Indiana originally, and had sort of the same thought process. I can go wherever I want. I mean, I've got good grades. I could probably get into a lot of medical school. But I thought to myself, I just want to know where I'm going. I just I'm ready to make that decision and I can apply to Indiana University School of Medicine, early decision, and I can know by my birthday in October where I'm going to medical school and that I am going to medical school.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I thought to myself, I'm going to apply to IU early admission and if that goes well for me, I think I'm done. It's probably my cheapest option for medical school too and it's a great medical school. There's no question about that. So I applied to IU and really didn't think any harder than that after that. Once I got my letter in the mail, I'm like, okay, that's great. I could have gone elsewhere. Wasn't particularly inclined to do it. By then I was really involved in just leadership in general. I had applied to be on the board of trustees for Indiana University, the state system, and was doing a lot of stuff with the university president and chancellor in leadership activities at the university. So I thought this is great. I know this university, I know these people, this is going to be just fine for me. So I did that.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: By the time I was getting to residency, now I've got two babies and I wanted to be close to family and have them close to their grandparents. And so that made that a pretty easy decision to me, not withstanding the fact that there are two great family medicine training programs in Northern Indiana. So that made it kind of an easy sell for me as well. So for all those reasons, there's lots of times I could have gone off the charts but I never had any pressure that I had to do that. I never felt like I owed it though my family would have been thrilled if I'd gone somewhere else. They would've come to visit. It would've been just fine. I was never told that I had to be that way, but it has been nice every step of the way to make the decision to stay in Indiana and be gratified by that with wonderful education and great mentors and amazing opportunities to do the things that a family doctor does.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Now, to wrap up my answer to your question. Some people have said to me, well, we're not sure that we want to ask Dr. Marker to do this thing or that thing, or he be involved in this thing or that thing because it might mean that he would have to go somewhere other than just staying in Indiana for his whole life. And Kirsten and I just kind of laugh at that because while we are here near our parents, or we're empty nesters now and South Bend, Indiana is a great leaping off place for vacations and leadership work and all sorts of things, but I could imagine a chapter in my life that doesn't involve being a Hoosier. I could also imagine that I die in the Hoosier state and stay here for all of my professional career too.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: But I just think that at each step of the way it behooves all of us to be open-minded about the direction that we're called to go in in our careers. And I just have felt along the way that my calling has been to stay in Indiana heretofore, but I could hear differently tomorrow. And while parts of a transition would be hard to do, if that's what the good Lord calls me to do, then I would program to say yes to that. So I'm just going to keep on doing the good work here in Indiana that I can and do all the national things that I can from here. And if there's a time in the future when the right thing is to be in another place, then Kirsten and I will answer that call.\n\nAnnette Routon: Well, considering you have an RV now, you really can just go anywhere now.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: I could. I could. I don't know that I could park my camper under the bridge by the river in any city.\n\nAnnette Routon: I mean, yeah. I mean, there's other they've had that. I think they actually have like RV parks now. I don't think you have to park under a bridge or something like that. I think they have some places like that, but yeah, you can go anywhere and live in your RV. That's quite the thing now with everyone living in the RVs.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Yes. We got really lucky. We started looking back in April when people were just kind of trying to decide whether COVID was really a thing or not really a thing, and we found a really great deal on just the right camper for us. And we have used the heck out of that thing. It's the perfect COVID vacation. You don't have to go 4:30 [inaudible","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863#t=2257.0,2664.0"},{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863/transcript/85499/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"] for everybody else. Plenty of fresh air. We've spent this summer doing that or on the camper this last weekend again. So anyway.\n\nAnnette Routon: I know. All right, well this is actually kind of the final question, of course. So well, Jason, you have led a very active and accomplished career and you contributed much to the specialty of family medicine. Before we conclude, is there anything that you'd like to add that we didn't cover?\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Yeah. For every oral history that gets taken from me, from somebody like me, there are dozens of other oral histories that could be taken by family medicine doctors who are doing just as fascinating a work as I've done in different places and in different ways from small private practices and owned entrances, doctors who've been amazing parents and children and siblings and have done a lot of great things. I think it is tempting sometimes to say, well, this person had an oral history taken. There must be something super special about them. But time and time again when I talk to family doctors about what they're doing in their own community and in other organizations, I'm blown away by the heart of family medicine doctors to take care of their patients in their communities.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: And yes, my niche has been to do that through professional leadership development and membership organization work, which a lot of people find terrible and never want to do but I have loved it and I found a home at the Academy and its foundation to do that piece of work. But you could talk to any other family doctor and take a really good oral history of their involvement with the specialty of family medicine and what they have meant to their communities and their patients, and find equally compelling stories at every turn. And I guess that's one of the things that I have really liked about being a family doctor.\n\nAnnette Routon: Okay. Well, having had the pleasure and privilege of working with you over the past four years with the Emerging Leader Institute, I appreciate this opportunity to interview you. And with that, this concludes the interview. Thank you very much, Jason.\n\nDr. Jason Marker: Thank you Annette. What a fun hour to spend with you.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2376/collection_resources/162441/file/295863#t=2664.0,2805.96"}]}]}]}