John David Heintzman, M.D., M.P.H., has spent his career at OHSU Family Medicine. He is a family physician by training completing his residency within the department in 2005. His first job out of residency involved working with patients who were primarily Latino farm workers in Willamette Valley. The department contracted him to Clackamas County’s community health, in the past, residents were sent there to do prenatal care, continuity practice and precepting. Through this initial experience he saw the barriers his patients faced. When the relationship with Clackamas County changed, he went on to get a Master of Public Health and Clinical Research at OHSU. Dr. Heintzman did not plan to go into research; he thought he was going to be a rural family doc after going on rotations in Enterprise and Ontario OR. Through getting his Master’s, he had the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. DeVoe, current Department Chair, and learned he liked the process of writing a paper, started developing research questions around the patients he had and realized that he liked that kind of writing. He also met Miguel Marino, Ph.D., who would become one of his research partners.  

Now fully a physician scientist, he does primary care research, and health equity research on how individuals may experience barriers to healthcare. He studies how the system can provide quality and effective care for patients and how in a community healthcare setting routine services are delivered nationally to Latino patients. He also returned to seeing patients at Clackamas where he has access to OCHIN data and can be found rounding on family medicine inpatient service (FMIS).  

Most of Dr. Heintzman’s research is through the PRIMER Center, a center he co-directs with Dr. Marino. The team is currently working on a couple projects, including studying telemedicine and diabetes care, asthma in Latino adults, and cancer prevention in Latinos with a focus on how they receive cancer services. Since its inception in 2012, the team has collaborated and published just shy of 100 papers. One of his most favored achievements thus far in his career has been the establishment of the PRIMER Summit, an annual in-person event that invites individuals and teams from various backgrounds to connect around Latino health in primary care, the most recent summit focused on “The role of primary care in cancer control in the Latino population.”  This unique opportunity is funded by Dr. Marino’s Silver Fund Grant and grew out of the co-directors’ desires to write together and to have a group of collaborators to think through certain topics.  

Dr. Heintzman values the family medicine discipline very highly. At OHSU there’s also a value for family medicine and there’s a combination of scholarship that you don’t find in many other family medicine departments. The knowledge generation/research combined with the passion for equity is unique in this department.  Health equity research is no different than any other kind of research in the sense that it has always had trouble in having its results make its way to the front lines of care delivery. Connecting to community and real-world, clinical practice is an urgent priority for equity researchers.  Dr. Heintzman hopes in the future that the field will continue to expand its ability to do its work in concert with community members. To that effect, they are building a community advisory board that oversees the community. This is the big direction Dr. Heintzman hopes to see over the next 5-10 years.