Nickole Forget, MD, FACP

Originally from a small farming community in southern Missouri, Dr. Forget moved to St. Louis in 1988 to attend Washington University (WashU) where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in both biology and psychology before moving onto St. Louis University School of Medicine, where she earned her Medical Doctorate degree. She then completed residency training in Internal Medicine (IM) at Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM)/Barnes-Jewish Hospital (BJH). Following residency training, Dr. Forget held a position at the University of Pennsylvania where she worked primarily in a rural healthcare setting as a general practitioner and medical student educator. In 2001, Dr. Forget returned to St. Louis and since that time has worked exclusively with an underserved population while mentoring both medical students and residents.

Prior to her current role, she served as an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Saint Louis University’s School of Medicine and was an Internal Medicine Associate Program Director at Mercy Hospital St. Louis for nine years.  She now serves as core faculty for Washington University’s School of Medicine’s Internal Medicine training program and is the Medical Director for Barnes-Jewish Hospital’s Primary Care Medicine Clinic which provides outpatient care for the underserved and clinical training for over 140 Internal Medicine residents.

Dr. Forget’s specific areas of interest include system streamlining to improve healthcare for the underinsured/uninsured and innovating to improve resident education. Some of the initiatives she has led over the last 25 years include physician recruiting and contracting, assessing electronic health record platforms prior to facility acquisition, establishing a Healer’s Arts Program for housestaff, creating an evidence-based workflow for the treatment of chronic pain for faculty and housestaff, and revamping the resident ambulatory experience to better align patient care with resident education.  Her teams most recent work was published in The Journal of Public Health in May of this year.

Dr. Forget has collaborated with both faculty and housestaff on many quality improvement projects and has presented her teams’ work at both local and national meetings.  Some of the work presented includes improvements to domestic violence screening, assessing patient literacy in the residents’ continuity clinic and developing a psychiatric collaborative to improve patients’ access to mental healthcare.

Dr. Forget has served on numerous committees over her career including the Credentialing Committee, Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee, Graduate Medical Education Committee, and the MO ACP Finance Committee.  She currently chairs WUSM’s Academy of Educator’s Small Grants Committee and sits on the Missouri State Medical Foundation’s Board of Directors.

When Dr. Forget is not engaged with patients and housestaff, she enjoys spending time with her husband of 26 years, her three teenage children (most of the time), her friends, and her extended family. She particularly enjoys volunteering at her children’s schools, gardening, spending time in National Parks, taking family RV trips, and reading a good book.