MultiCare opens new adult primary care clinic in Spokane, teaching up to 24 student doctors by 2030

MultiCare has plans to double the number of primary care student doctors in Spokane within the next four years.

Next door to Deaconess hospital, the new Internal Medicine Residency Clinic will provide adult primary care while training a new generation of doctors getting the final training in Spokane.

The clinic will open April 6 and the first class of six residents will begin in June 2027. That number will grow to 24 residents learning and practicing medicine by 2030, according to MultiCare. The infusion of additional internal medicine residents will be a major boost to the number of new doctors getting trained in the city.

“We are starting a little smaller, but eventually the footprint will be 24 residents and 10 faculty all in this space – learning, teaching, seeing patients from Deaconess and improving access to primary care in the Inland Northwest,” said MultiCare Chief Academic Officer Jennifer Knowles.

When a new doctor graduates from medical school, their training does not end. For the first several years of their career, doctors receive hands-on training while treating patients under the supervision of veteran physicians.

Each residency program has a different specialization. Internal medicine is a form of primary care for adults. Typical treatment at an internal medicine clinic includes managing chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease or high blood pressure.

“Patients often come with many problems across that spectrum, and an internal medicine doctor is uniquely qualified to take that complexity of lots of medical problems and chart a course for the patient’s best life,” Knowles said.

MultiCare plans to recruit “every single one” of the residents trained in internal medicine at the clinic to be internal medicine physicians at Deaconess hospital, Rockwood clinics or elsewhere within MultiCare, she added.

“I can’t actually overstate how huge the impact will be. Residency programs far from large metropolitan centers are not the rule,” Knowles said.

The clinic will have 22 exam rooms, a procedure room, workspace for residents, virtual care capabilities and a wellness space. Each resident in the program will stay at the clinic for three years of post-medical school training.

Operational costs to run the program will be in the “several millions of dollars,” said MultiCare spokesperson Kevin Maloney. The majority of those funds come through federal funding that will flow through Deaconess Hospital.

The clinic will be the first MultiCare residency program in Eastern Washington. Other residency programs in Spokane are run by Providence. The internal medicine residency program within Providence’s Spokane Teaching Health Center currently has 30 residents. Among all different specialties, there are more than a hundred residents being trained in Spokane at Providence facilities.

According to the Health Resources and Services administration, Washington is thousands of doctors short of meeting the health care needs of the state. That shortage can be exacerbated in rural areas in Eastern Washington, said Rachel Safran, one of the physicians running the new residency program.

“We have a huge shortage of primary care physicians in our community. So in addition to providing care for the patient, we’ll be training the next generation of doctors,” she said.

Spokane has also seen some residency programs contract in recent years. In 2025, Providence’s Family Medicine Residency Spokane when from 10 residents a year down to six.

Spokane Family Medicine physician and University of Washington School of Medicine professor Dr. Molly Gilbert said the shortage of family physicians is hurting Spokane patients.

“If you need a new doctor as a family, it can take six to nine months. It’s terrible,” Gilbert said.

The new internal medicine residency program will be “a great help” to increase the number of primary care physicians in Spokane, she added.

In addition to offering another avenue for medical students to stay in Spokane, the clinic will provide rotations for two to four medical students planning to specialize in internal medicine.

“We welcome further development of the primary care workforce in Eastern Washington and welcome the opportunity to have additional opportunities for our students to learn and train,” UW medical school Spokane dean Dr. Darryl Potyk said in a statement.

The clinic will be located on the sixth floor of the Deaconess Medical Office Building next door to the main hospital in downtown Spokane. For the past 15 years, the space had been used as storage for broken medical equipment. Before the advent of digital record keeping, it had been a family medicine clinic.

“This clinic space has such a large footprint because there was a whole section of the office that was devoted to storing racks and racks and racks of paper charts,” Knowles said.

When the previous clinicians retired, no one wanted to rent the space because it was too large for a modern primary care clinic. But it is the perfect size to host a large amount of student doctors.

“In a residency, you need space for 24 residents to sit to chart, to be taught, for educational didactic experiences. You need places for medical students to land, for faculty to do evaluations. All of that space exists here just by sheer serendipity,” Knowles said.

Renovations will cost upwards of a $1 million. Half of that cost was covered through a state grant secured by state Sen. Marcus Riccelli, D-Spokane.

“We have one of the most economically challenged communities in the state,” Riccelli said. “This clinic improves access to folks on Medicaid in this time, which is hugely important.”

Residency programs typically have more Medicaid and Medicare patients than the typical internal medicine clinic, Knowles said.

Two physicians and several nurses will work to develop a base of patients, so residents have patients to treat when they are recruited in 2027.

“Receiving care in a residency clinic is a fantastic experience. Sometimes the care visit takes a little bit longer than a nonteaching clinic, because there’s teaching going on,” Knowles said. “But one of the distinct advantages of receiving care at a teaching clinic is that you get two or three physicians thinking about your care with the most up-to-date medical knowledge.”