August 21, 2024
Dr. Boggiano works as a family physician in Chapel Hill and teaches in the Family Medicine Department and at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine.
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“I always knew I wanted to do Family Medicine,” she says. She learned how the specialty benefits patients well before she began medical school at Stanford University, when she worked as the coordinator for women’s health programs at a Federally Qualified Health Center outside Washington, DC. She spent a year working at the center through the AmeriCorps Community HealthCorps Navigator program and saw the spectrum of care that good medicine requires. “I got to work with a variety of practitioners doing amazing primary care there,” Dr. Boggiano says, “and I was certain even then that I would go into primary care. And then, in my very first month of medical school, I got to link up with a researcher who was also a family physician. Then I was set to become part of the national Family Medicine world.”
This world included the Society for Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM), along with the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). By the time Dr. Boggiano was finishing medical school, she had been to conferences hosted by each association and knew plenty of family physicians she counted as mentors. “At that point, I had gotten to know the family physicians at Stanford,” Dr. Boggiano says. “When I did my sub-internship at a Stanford-affiliated hospital in San Jose, it was only Family Medicine residents working there. I got to rotate on a bunch of different services with them: obstetrics, pediatrics, internal medicine, and others.” This experience showed that Dr. Boggiano would need a residency that taught full-spectrum care to deliver the care she wanted to practice.
“I asked myself, ‘What’s the specialty where I can do all these things?’” she says. “That’s Family Medicine.” After she completed an impactful interview with the UNC School of Medicine’s Family Medicine Residency (it was Dr. Boggiano’s final interview and occurred in late January), she knew that the residency would check all the boxes she needed. “I thought, this is where I want to go, and these are the people I want to have as my colleagues one day.’ And it’s been great getting to follow this path and become a family doctor.”
NCAFP member Dr. Evan Ashkin, whom Dr. Boggiano first met while interviewing at UNC, is today her colleague. “His work today and back then is so inspiring,” she says. Along with Dr. Ashkin, Dr. Boggiano also gets to “live that full-spectrum life,” as she calls it. “It’s very collaborative work, and I feel very lucky. I have an amazing patient panel in our clinic, where I manage a variety of acute patient complaints, chronic conditions, participate in gender-affirming care, care for patients with opioid use disorder, you name it. It’s really rewarding. And in everything, my anchor is that I get to be a family physician.”
She also gets to be a teacher for medical students who are asking the same questions she had answered at Stanford. “I do some teaching at the residency, and I also get to serve as a faculty advisor,” Dr. Boggiano says. “In addition, I get to work with a group of medical students in their patient-centered care course. We work with them throughout their first and second year to show them the patient-facing side of clinical medicine.” This long-term advising to medical students at UNC led her to become the faculty advisor at the UNC Family Medicine Interest Group (FMIG). “Having been in an FMIG myself only a few years ago, I definitely feel a little impostor syndrome,” Dr. Boggiano says, “but it’s great. The work is really fun, and the students are so impressive.” (The UNC FMIG recently received an AAFP award for excellence, due to the hard work of the students Dr. Boggiano praised.)
One other thing that Dr. Boggiano likes about advising the UNC FMIG is that she can now attend the AAFP National Conference for work, not just for pleasure. “Since my second year of medical school [in 2016], I’ve only missed National Conference twice,” she says. “One was to get married, and the second was for maternity leave. The conferences are always great no matter the stage of your career, thanks to the educational sessions, the national leadership through the student congress, and the students and residents all coming together.”
Her long-term experience at the AAFP National Conference helped her integrate with the NCAFP, where Dr. Boggiano is a leader among our new physician members. “I served as the North Carolina resident delegate in 2020,” she says, “and the chapter leaders were like, ‘You’re a resident here and we’re going to support you in whatever you want to do.’ And I loved that.” In 2023, Dr. Boggiano helped put on the September CME & Dinner event at UNC in Chapel Hill, and today, she looks forward to attending the NCAFP Winter Family Physicians Weekend in December. “It was a tremendous conference last year,” she says. “It has the high energy of the AAFP National Conference but focused on North Carolina. I know that we’ll be learning things that meaningfully relate to my patients and my practice.”