By: Molly Franzonello
Editor’s Note: Kelly Weiss, DO, MS, is a family physician and one of the new FACTS Fertility Integrative and Restorative Medicine (FIRM) Fellows. After recognizing gaps in fertility awareness education during her medical training, she pursued opportunities—including the FACTS resident elective—to better support patients seeking non-hormonal family planning and root-cause approaches to reproductive health. Now as a family physician in Maryland, Dr. Weiss is using the FIRM Fellowship to build the clinical skills and mentorship needed to integrate fertility literacy and cooperative hormonal and reproductive medicine into comprehensive primary care.
Dr. Kelly Weiss’s interest in fertility medicine began with a problem familiar to many physicians: her patients were asking questions about family-planning options that she had not been trained to answer.
During medical school and residency, patients approached her with questions about fertility awareness-based methods (FABMs) related to their family-planning goals. Yet, despite completing extensive medical training, Dr. Weiss realized she lacked the knowledge to adequately counsel these patients—or even to refer them elsewhere.
Rather than accepting that gap, she began searching for a way to fill it.
That search eventually led her to FACTS about Fertility. In August 2026, she began the FACTS fellowship in Fertility Integrative and Restorative Medicine (FIRM), a two-year program she anticipates completing in July 2028.
Returning Home to Practice Family Medicine
Dr. Weiss brings to the fellowship a background that spans science, healthcare administration, lifestyle medicine, and family medicine.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Mount St. Mary’s University before completing a Master of Science in healthcare administration at the University of Maryland Global Campus. She then earned her Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree from Nova Southeastern University Dr. Kiran C. Patel College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2023.
After medical school, Dr. Weiss completed her first two years of family medicine residency at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Lititz. When the program closed, she continued her training at UPMC Williamsport Family Medicine Residency, where she completed her final year in June 2026.
Following residency, Dr. Weiss returned to Maryland, where she was born and raised, to begin practicing within the Ascension-Saint Agnes health system. Today, she works four days a week at Ascension-Saint Agnes Primary Care in Elkridge, Maryland, the health system and region where her own story began.
Her background also gives her a unique perspective on the systems surrounding patient care. Her master’s training introduced her to healthcare administration, including the complexities of billing, coding, and insurance. Before medical school, she worked as a scribe in a urology practice and gained early exposure to male infertility.
Discovering a Gap in Medical Training
During residency, Dr. Weiss became increasingly aware of how difficult it could be to incorporate fertility awareness and root-cause approaches into conventional medical training.
Patients were interested. And she was interested, but the clinical infrastructure and mentorship were not always there. When caring for patients experiencing infertility, Dr. Weiss found that she could not simply begin incorporating fertility awareness-based approaches on her own. Without attending physicians trained in these methods, she lacked the supervision necessary to confidently evaluate and treat patients using them.
The experience highlighted an important distinction between learning about an approach and learning how to integrate it into practice. Dr. Weiss did not want to piece together fertility medicine while caring for patients in real time. She wanted structured education, hands-on clinical experience, and mentorship from physicians already trained in cooperative reproductive endocrinology (CoRE).
Finding FACTS
Dr. Weiss’s path to FACTS began when a colleague encouraged her to explore the work of FACTS Executive Director Dr. Marguerite Duane.
From there, she participated in the FACTS resident elective and a NeoFertility cohort, giving her greater exposure to fertility awareness and approaches to reproductive healthcare that addressed the gaps she had noticed in residency.
Her involvement with FACTS grew, and she formally became affiliated with the organization in 2024. By the end of residency, fertility had also found its way into her work as an educator. In June 2026, her presentation, “Fertility: There’s an app for that?” earned second place during the Visiting Professor program at UPMC Williamsport.
The FIRM Fellowship offered the next step she had been looking for: the opportunity to move beyond introductory education to develop the clinical skills needed to incorporate fertility awareness and a root-cause approach directly into patient care.
Bringing Fertility Medicine into Primary Care
Dr. Weiss has intentionally structured her new role to accommodate both primary care and fellowship training. She sees patients Monday through Thursday and dedicates Fridays to the FIRM Fellowship.
Her goal is not to build fertility medicine as an entirely separate part of her work. Instead, she envisions integrating it into comprehensive family medicine. That could begin with something as routine as the annual wellness visit.
Dr. Weiss plans to incorporate questions about reproductive life and fertility into preventive visits, using those conversations as opportunities to identify concerns that might otherwise go unaddressed. From infertility and menstrual or hormonal concerns to thyroid disease, weight management, and metabolic health, she sees reproductive health as interconnected with the broader health issues family physicians already manage.
In that sense, cooperative hormonal and restorative reproductive healthcare is not outside the scope of primary care—it can be part of practicing primary care more comprehensively. This approach also creates opportunities to reach patients long before they seek specialty fertility care. By incorporating reproductive health assessments into routine visits and utilizing the female cycle chart as a vital sign, physicians may recognize patterns, investigate underlying health concerns, and help patients better understand fertility as an important marker of overall health.
From Interest to Clinical Confidence
Perhaps most importantly, the FIRM Fellowship gives Dr. Weiss something she found difficult to access during prior training: mentorship. To provide patients with high-quality fertility care, physicians need opportunities to develop clinical skills under the guidance of practitioners experienced in these approaches. The fellowship provides Dr. Weiss dedicated time to build that experience under the guidance of Dr. Joe Davis, the fellowship director at FACTS, and Dr. Duane, who serves as her clinical site director at her medical practice, MD for Life.
Her experience illustrates why advanced training opportunities in fertility awareness and cooperative reproductive endocrinology matter for physicians who recognize a need among their patients but may have received little exposure to these approaches during conventional medical education. For Dr. Weiss, the FIRM Fellowship bridges that gap.
A Broader Vision for Women’s Health
As Dr. Weiss begins both her career as an attending family physician and her fellowship training, she is building a practice in which reproductive health is not treated as an isolated concern.
Her background in lifestyle medicine, osteopathic medicine, healthcare administration, and family medicine gives her multiple lenses through which to consider a patient’s health. The FIRM Fellowship adds another: the ability to more deeply understand fertility and reproductive physiology and apply that knowledge in everyday medical care.
Her vision is ultimately practical. A patient coming to a primary care physician for an annual visit should be able to talk about fertility. A patient seeking a non-hormonal approach to family planning should encounter a physician prepared to discuss her options. And a patient experiencing infertility or hormonal health concerns should have a clinician equipped to look more deeply at potential underlying contributors.
For Dr. Weiss, becoming a FACTS FIRM Fellow is an opportunity to become that physician.
By intentionally integrating fertility awareness and a root-cause approach into primary care from the beginning of her career, Dr. Weiss is helping demonstrate what comprehensive family medicine can look like when reproductive health is recognized not as a separate specialty concern, but as an integral part of caring for the whole person.
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