Pioneering New Frontiers: Tri-Valley Hospital’s Family Medicine Residency Tackles Doctor Shortage
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Minjoung Go, MD, a trailblazer at Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley, has transformed the hospital into an academic powerhouse, launching a new Family Medicine Residency to address the primary care shortage.
As one of the first faculty members at Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley in 2015, Minjoung Go, MD, clinical associate professor, never imagined she would lead the hospital’s metamorphosis from a community hospital into an educational powerhouse.
She spent nine years orchestrating complex internal infrastructures to expand Stanford’s top-notch clinical, educational, and research footprint into the East Bay. The crown achievement so far is the Family Medicine Residency Program, which has the dual mission of training the next generation of physicians and addressing the Tri-Valley community’s urgent need for primary care doctors.
The Family Medicine Residency Program integrates academic medicine and community-centric health services to prepare future family physicians for an advancing frontier in medicine that seeks to balance specialized healthcare delivery with community care.
“This hospital has deep roots in the community, and that will always be at its core,” Go says. “We are bringing Stanford’s resources here to grow together with the community.”
Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley (then named Valley Memorial Hospital) was originally established in 1961 to serve the communities of Pleasanton, Livermore, and Dublin – collectively known as the Tri-Valley area. In 2015, Stanford Health Care acquired the hospital system to transform it into a leading medical, academic, and research health system in line with Stanford’s reputation for rigor and quality to meet the healthcare needs of these growing suburban communities.
Under Go’s leadership, Tri-Valley Hospital received accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, and in June 2025, eight inaugural interns will join the Family Medicine Residency Program.
Unlike Stanford’s main campus, the hospital wasn’t designed to be an educational institution.
Go, along with Kathleen Jia, MD, medical director for education, and Lijia Xie, MD, associate medical education director, had to get stakeholder buy-in, create and implement all the inner workings of a medical education system to meet requirements, and obtain accreditation for the Family Medicine Residency Program.
“Everything we’ve done is from scratch,” Go says. “We had to build the entire educational infrastructure and secure the necessary approvals, all while continuing to provide patient care.”
The program’s inclusive curriculum goes beyond the traditionally specialized medical care approach typically observed in academic health systems. It addresses local health challenges and needs, builds strong relationships with local federally qualified health centers and Stanford partners, and offers a mix of inpatient and outpatient experiences.
“This hospital has deep roots in the community, and that will always be at its core,” Go says. “We are bringing Stanford’s resources here to grow together with the community.”
– Minjoung Go, MD
In close collaboration with leaders from the Division of Primary Care and Population Health, Go’s team recruited the program director, developed outpatient and inpatient experiences, built relationships with community clinics, and interfaced with future educators in the Tri-Valley.
“Dr. Go has exerted extraordinary efforts that have advanced the missions of Stanford University and Stanford Health Care,” says Tri-Valley’s chief medical officer, David Svec, MD.
As Tri-Valley expanded, Go zeroed in on the lack of family doctors in the area by turning her attention to building out the much-anticipated Family Medicine Residency Program.
From its community roots to an academic hub, Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley has evolved into a center of clinical, educational, and research excellence, launching a Family Medicine Residency Program to train the next generation of primary care doctors.
“It doesn’t work that way. We had to go through all the right compliances and regulatory pieces – none of which were present,” Go says. “We had to learn and figure out what the process was and then implement it and get the right approval from the medical staff and the hospital.”
Tri-Valley needed to become a qualified sponsoring institution to provide graduate medical education, and then Go and her team needed to design and build an entire residency curriculum and hire the faculty.
None of that would have been possible without Go’s extensive efforts to shift the culture of Tri-Valley to focus more on the academic mission of education and research, says Jia.
“She was thorough and meticulous, with a vision of the goal but also focused on the details and made sure things were done right from the beginning steps,” Jia says. “This really speaks to her drive, vision, and dedication to building the frontiers of academic education at Tri-Valley.”
The hard work has been worth it.
“What makes everyone so excited and supportive about this initiative is that we are driven by passions and beliefs that family doctors will make a big difference and impact in this community,” Go says.
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