Kauai medical training track graduates first five doctors to residency
Five Kauai-trained doctors entered residency after the island’s first medical track graduated on June 29, a pipeline built to send them back to practice at home.
Kauai’s first medical-training cohort sent five doctors into residency on June 29, closing the first round of a pipeline meant to bring more physicians back to the island. Kirra Borrello, Jamie Emoto, Erin Evangelista, Brent Fujimoto and Ivana Yoon graduated from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa John A. Burns School of Medicine after four years built around Kauai rotations and community-based care. The program is designed to send them back to practice on Kauai for at least four years after residency.
The Kauai Medical Training Track opened in August 2022 with six inaugural students, including Dylan Lawton, and was backed by a $10 million commitment from Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. It was launched as a direct response to long-running physician shortages on Kauai and across rural Hawaii, with the goal of improving health and wellness for island families.
The track is built to keep students tied to Kauai throughout medical school rather than sending them through four years in Honolulu and hoping they return later. Students spend part of their first two preclinical years on the island for problem-based learning, clinical skills and service learning, then live on Kauai again in the third and fourth years for an outpatient clerkship semester, additional rotations and electives. Travis Hong, JABSOM’s director of rural training, watched the class progress from its welcome reception at The Plantation House by Gaylord’s in 2022 to graduation this year. Erika Noel, appointed director in late 2022, has overseen the track’s development.
The first graduates enter residency training at a time when the state’s health-care workforce remains strained well beyond Oahu. The Hawaii Department of Health designates the entire state outside Honolulu as a primary medical Health Professional Shortage Area, and a University of Hawaii physician workforce assessment project has tracked shortages since 2010. Kauai’s population is about 74,000.
By September 2025, the program had already expanded to a fourth cohort and 22 students were in the pipeline. Chan and Zuckerberg also gave Wilcox Medical Center $1.48 million in 2026 for imaging technology.
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