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| 13 Nov 2025 | |
| IAFP Awards |
| Geriatrics Member Interest Group |
Raj C. Shah, MD
Rush Alzeimer’s Center
Co-Chair IAFP Geriatrics Member Interest Group
Dr. Shah was nominated by Janet Albers, MD, FAAFP who is Chair of Family Medicine at SIU and the recipient of the very first Vincent Keenan Servant Leadership award in 2022.
Raj C. Shah, MD, is professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center and served for over a decade as the Medical Director, Rush Memory Clinic. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. After completing a family practice residency at West Suburban Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Park, Illinois, he received further training in geriatrics at Rush University in 2000 before joining Rush as faculty.
“I don't think I would have predicted this pathway as I was finishing my residency training at West Suburban.” He knew wanted to help people's health throughout their lifespan, from prenatal care to birth to young adulthood to middle age to old age.
“And [at West Suburban], I realized that If I could work with the older generation in a family, I could somehow influence especially the grandmother, how to take care of the two or three generations underneath her. And it started to dawn on me that…Alzheimer's disease was not only the number one neurodegenerative disease of people that were older, But it was the number one disease from a public health point of view that seemed to be impacting, the well-being of older adults and their family.”
Dr. Shah’s Impact on IAFP:
He was an early leader of the IAFP Public Health Committee when Vince Keenan was the executive director. “He was willing to allow the members to offer opportunities or ideas. It was such a pleasure to learn from individuals that were leading those committees as family physicians that were involved in public health and different roles.” There was an advisory committee for Alzheimer's disease at the Illinois Department of Public Health. One of the elected positions was a physician in primary care. Dr. Shah was nominated to that advisory committee by IAFP.
Shah coordinated the first IAFP Public Health Student interns, providing research and publication activities for medical student members from Illinois and international medical schools.
And that led to the Geriatrics Member Interest Group along with then IAFP member Eukesh Ranjit, MD - where he serves as co-chair still.
One of their projects is a 2024 two-part webinar series on Caring for Older Adults (View Part 1 and Part 2)
"This was a great way to get students involved and residents to understand this is a facet of family medicine and of aging. Student members were able to work with us as they were trying to think through their careers," says Shah.
One of the projects involved working with the Center for Community Health Equity to put out a report called Synchronicity Report which was trying to understand where were the barriers where all the evidence was pointing to sort of better mental health services and collaborative care models in an effort to remove the many burdens and restrictions limiting access.
He received the 2020 IAFP President’s Award from Monica Fudala, MD.
Most recently, he is known at IAFP as the ultimate faculty leader of the Brain Trust project https://thebraintrustproject.com
He's presented two CME programs that deliver the requirement for Illinois education on dementia and cognitive issues for any physician caring for patients over age 26. You can take the latest version here. https://youtu.be/cyAspePxP8k?si=94gpXzMf-dqSzKhG
Most notably he and Dr. Ranjit tag teamed on a recorded a two-year series of podcasts with physician leaders across the dementia care spectrum and also a striking series of Caregiver podcast episodes sharing the stories of Alzheimer's patients told directly by their loved ones. https://thebraintrustproject.com/#episodes
“I'm really thankful to the Illinois Department of Public Health, and Desma and Kate and others that helped us to organize the brain trust programming that we did as part of that project. We wanted to present it as peer-to-peer education for people to understand what the day-to-day differences were in different primary care practices in Illinois. Those stories help us really understand how various primary care physicians in Illinois were starting to think about how to make early diagnosis of dementia day-to-day, and how they were making it work," says Shah.
"We were able to extend that and to bring in the patient story, the person living with dementia, or their caregivers, to talk through their stories when do they feel really that sense of belonging when they saw their primary care physician shepherd them through their process. It was always heartwarming to get comments back, saying they really learned something from it, from especially the residents and fellows, early in their career."
IAFP took that concept out to the community with a Docs Night Out called Conversations with Families about Alzheimer’s in July 2024. Dr. Shah led this interactive format where everyone could engage and learn from each other and about Dementia-Friendly Communities like Dementia Friendly Westmont where the event was held.
Where do you see family medicine as a power in public health?
“I think the biggest power we have is our power in numbers, we represent so many of the practicing physicians in Illinois and we represent such diversity across the state. With our residency training programs, and with our multiple medical schools, we have all these opportunities, to engage people in this pathway.
Wherever we practice, or however our scope changes in family medicine, the key is about the family side. Family and community, that's our superpower in our training, right? We're the intersection between the health systems and the community systems, as a primary family medicine physician. We can make so much of a difference by small things we do every day in applying our learnings and our understandings to help people to age better."
He says he always tells the family physicians essentially, “you're doing all the right things now. I just want you to appreciate all that work you're doing to control and prevent people from developing high blood pressure and cholesterol and diabetes and to stop smoking and to stay active." That support in younger years will help people to age better, maintain their abilities longer.
As for his work with IAFP, Shah says, "The closest sense of belonging I feel to are my family medicine colleagues, and they definitely keep me motivated to keep working through difficult, challenging times. And if we build that community, we support that through groups like IAFP, where we can meet and engage, and get other generations to see these pathways, and however they want to take it, we do something unique in Illinois that others can then learn from and grow around the country."
Dr. Shah also is the Rush site principal investigator for the Chicago Area Patient-Centered Outcomes. Research Network (CAPriCORN), a consortium of academic health systems and other partners working to develop, test and implement strategies to improve care for diverse residents in the Chicago region in order to improve health care quality, health outcomes and health equity.
He has been a named author on 176 peer-reviewed publications including 13 first author, 12 second author, and 8 final author publications. He also was an editor of the book Community Health Equity: A Chicago Reader published by the University of Chicago Press in 2019.
The book serves as resource to summarize the lifespan of a human to understand and change courses to improve health for all and continues to be maintained at the Center for Community Health Equity by students who update the articles every year that are coming in that space. “It's really rewarding to see all the colleagues trying to address these very complex issues that no one person can solve, no one community can solve. But we can keep chipping away to make this world a little bit of a better place for everybody.”
Dr. Shah has led education, community engagement and recruitment efforts of the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, especially in communities under-represented in aging research. He is the co-Director of the Center for Community Health Equity, an initiative jointly led by Rush University Medical Center and DePaul University designed to reduce hardship and improve health outcomes in Chicago. He also mentors diverse students interested in the health sciences at the high school, college, graduate and post-graduate levels, especially through two well-established summer internship programs he co-designed with other faculty. He is an Executive Committee member of the Rush Mentoring Program and has served as a thesis advisor in the Master of Science in Clinical Research of The Graduate College. He has developed and taught curriculum for the Family Medicine Leadership Program and the Master of Science in Clinical Research at Rush.