Teaching Health Centers

The Affordable Care Act authorizes the establishment of teaching health center development grants to establish or expand primary care residency training programs in health centers, which are community-based ambulatory patient care centers such as Federally Qualified Health Centers and Rural Health Clinics.

The law also authorizes the National Health Service Corps to count as much as 50 percent of time spent teaching by a Corps member in a qualified teaching health center toward fulfillment of the service obligation and directs HHS to make GME payments to teaching health centers.

Affordable Care Act Section 5508 - Increasing Teaching Capacity

Date Last Reviewed:  April 2017


Did You Know?

Teaching health centers are community-based, ambulatory patient care centers that operate primary care residency programs.

Primary care residencies include family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics-gynecology, psychiatry, geriatrics, and general and pediatric dentistry.

Physicians trained in health centers are more than 3 times as likely to work in a health center and more than twice as likely to work in an underserved area than those not trained at health centers.