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GI Fellowship: Virginia Mason Franciscan Health

The Virginia Mason Franciscan Health (VMFH) GI Fellowship is an ACGME-accredited 3-year fellowship designed to provide comprehensive training in gastroenterology and hepatology. Upon graduation from the fellowship, trainees should be able to practice independently as a GI consultative specialist and are eligible to apply for ABIM GI board certification. The ACGME Program ID# for the VMFH GI Fellowship is 1445414001.

Although the VMFH GI Fellowship Program is relatively new, first accredited by the ACGME in 2024, the GI section at VMFH is long established, internationally renowned and very large, with 29 providers seeing thousands of clinic patients per month and performing more than 25,000 endoscopic procedures every year, including advanced procedures such as ERCP, EUS and balloon-assisted enteroscopy. There is also a busy in-patient GI consultative service that covers our 336-bed hospital. We have a very active clinical and translational research program, participate in many clinical trials, and publish more than 100 papers and abstracts per year. Prior to 2024, University of Washington GI fellows regularly rotated through our hospital, and many of our attending physicians hold faculty appointments at the University of Washington School of Medicine. VMFH serves a wide variety of patients from not just the greater Seattle area, but also from the rest of Washington state, neighboring states such as Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Montana, and the rest of the United States. VMFH also has well established residency programs in internal medicine, general surgery, radiology and anesthesiology.

At Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, fellows will rotate through in-patient and out-patient GI and liver consultative services, procedural blocks, the gastric lab, electives and research/academic project months. VMFH also has 4 large regional medical centers containing active outpatient endoscopy units in the suburbs of Bellevue, Lynnwood, Federal Way and Issaquah. Some of our fellows will rotate through these endoscopy units for their outpatient procedure months.

Eligible fellowship applicants must:

  1. Have completed an internal medicine residency in an ACGME-accredited program
  2. Demonstrate self-motivation and interest in continuous improvement
  3. Demonstrate interest and capacity for academic, teaching or quality control pursuits
  4. Possess mature interpersonal and communicative skills
  5. Be a U.S. citizen or have Permanent Residency (“green card”) status 

Leadership and administrative staff:

  • Otto Lin, MD, MS – GI Fellowship Program Director
  • Rajesh Krishnamoorthi, MD – GI Fellowship Associate Program Director
  • Blaire Burman, MD – GI Fellowship Associate Program Director
  • Jenn Rickmar – GI Fellowship Program Coordinator