SOAR
Strengthening Outcomes and Assessments in Residency
What is SOAR?
Preparing family medicine physicians to meet the needs of their patients is a fundamental goal of residency training. Increasingly, stakeholders recognize that residency outcome measures must incorporate performance after residency to evaluate whether training goals are accomplished as graduates enter their practice. In the absence of a formal knowledge-sharing system, a wealth of experiential wisdom is siloed rather than shared between program leaders. So, we might ask:
- In what novel ways can program leaders measure and take pride in describing their program’s strengths and outcomes?
- How can programs whose alumni consistently perform well in one or more areas of family medicine practice share with other programs how to prepare their residents for the same?
SOAR Operations Team
Brief biographical sketches of SOAR co-chairs and lead research scientist for use in the About section of the SOAR website.
Barbara Miller, MD, FAAFP
Co-Chair, SOAR | Program Director, Freeman Health System Family Medicine Residency, Joplin, MO
Barbara Miller, MD, FAAFP, is a board-certified family physician and the founding Program Director of the Freeman Health System Family Medicine Residency in Joplin, Missouri, a community-based program she established in late 2019 to address the primary care needs of rural southwest Missouri. She received her medical degree from the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine and completed her residency training at the University of Oklahoma – Tulsa.
Dr. Miller's work exemplifies SOAR's mission: using evidence and innovation to establish a blueprint for residency training that is accountable to the healthcare needs of people in the community. Dr. Miller is also the PI of a $2.1 million federal Health Resources and Services Administration grant to establish a Street Medicine Training Outreach program that expands access to care for people experiencing homelessness in Joplin, Missouri.
A member of the AFMRD Board of Directors, Dr. Miller brings both the perspective of a practicing rural clinician and the experience of a residency educator to her role as SOAR Co-Chair.
Jay Fetter, MSHA
Co-Chair, SOAR | Director of Residency Redesign, American Board of Family Medicine Foundation
Jay Fetter serves as Director of Residency Redesign at the American Board of Family Medicine Foundation, where he leads the organization's work advancing residency redesign activities. In this role, he oversees the SOAR Residency Learning Community and the Family Medicine Advancing Innovation in Residency Education (FM AIRE) initiative, a national collaborative between the ACGME and ABFM that supports residency programs piloting extended and innovative training models designed to better prepare family physicians for the future of practice.
Mr. Fetter previously served as Executive Director of the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors (AFMRD), where he worked to advance national faculty development and residency redesign initiatives addressing accreditation, innovation and workforce policy. He also oversaw the AAFP Division of Medical Education for six years, including operations of the Residency Assistance Program, the AAFP Commission on Education, and the P4 Residency Learning Collaborative.
As SOAR Co-Chair, Jay brings program-development and implementation science experience, helping to connect residency programs with the data, frameworks, and collaborative infrastructure needed to measure and share successful training outcomes. His work at the ABFM bridges board certification, educational quality, and the day-to-day realities of residency program leadership.
Lars Peterson, MD, PhD
Senior Physician Scientist, SOAR | Senior Physician Scientist, American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM)
Lars Peterson, MD, PhD, is a family physician and health services researcher who serves as Senior Physician Scientist at the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM). He also holds an appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Kentucky, where he provides direct patient care and teaches medical students and residents.
A native of Utah, Dr. Peterson earned his medical and doctoral degrees from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and completed his family medicine residency at the Trident/Medical University of South Carolina program. He is a 2019 recipient of the prestigious James C. Puffer, MD/ABFM Fellowship from the National Academy of Medicine.
Dr. Peterson leads a research team focused on understanding what family physicians do in practice and how the quality of care they provide can be strengthened, particularly through continuing certification activities. His broader research interests include rural health, comprehensiveness of primary care, and the relationships between socioeconomic conditions and health care access and outcomes. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and delivered over 100 national and international conference presentations.
As SOAR's lead research scientist, Dr. Peterson guides the work of SOAR scholars to build an evidence base for outcomes-focused residency education, connecting program-level training decisions to the real-world performance of family medicine graduates in practice.
Wendy Barr, MD, MPH, MSCE, FAAFP
Founding Member, SOAR Learning Community | Founding Residency Program Director, Yale Family Medicine Residency Program
Wendy Barr, MD, MPH, MSCE, FAAFP, is the Founding Residency Program Director for the Yale Family Medicine Residency Program at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital in New London, Connecticut—the first family medicine residency program in Yale School of Medicine's history, with its inaugural resident class expected in the 2027–2028 match cycle. A founding member of the SOAR learning community, Dr. Barr's career has been defined by her commitment to building residency programs that produce physicians capable of providing comprehensive, equitable care to the communities that need them most.
Dr. Barr completed her MD and MPH at Tufts University School of Medicine and her family medicine residency at the Lawrence Family Medicine Residency in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She subsequently completed a research and faculty development fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where she also earned a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology (MSCE)—grounding her educational leadership in a rigorous research methodology.
Prior to Yale, Dr. Barr served as Program Director, ACGME Designated Institutional Officer (DIO), and Vice President of Clinical Education at the Greater Lawrence Family Health Center, where she led the program's transition from a three-year to four-year curriculum as part of the national ACGME Length of Training Pilot—one of the nation's foremost residency redesign initiatives. She has also served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors (AFMRD).
Dr. Barr is a Distinguished Scholar for the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM), where her research focuses on GME outcomes and program improvement. She serves as co-Principal Investigator for both the Family Medicine Residency Outcomes Project (FM-ROP) and the ABFM Annual National Resident Survey—tools that are central to SOAR's mission of connecting training program characteristics to real-world graduate performance. Her published research includes work on the association between residency program design and graduates' likelihood of caring for children, directly informing how programs can be structured to produce physicians who deliver full-spectrum family medicine care.