By Molly Franzonello
Editor’s Note: Dr. Lisa Gilbert, MD, MA (Ethics), FAAFP, is a board-certified family physician, educator, and inaugural fellow in the FACTS Fertility Integrative and Restorative Medicine (FIRM) Fellowship . As a core faculty member at Ascension Via Christi Family Medicine Residency program, she combines a passion for women’s health, physician education, global health, and medical ethics to advance a root-cause approach to reproductive healthcare.
In this interview, Dr. Gilbert reflects on her journey from rural family medicine to fertility awareness and discusses how the FIRM Fellowship will strengthen her clinical practice and equip her to train the next generation of family physicians in evidence-based, cooperative hormonal and reproductive medicine.
For Dr. Lisa Gilbert, family medicine has always been about caring for patients across every stage of life. Her career has been shaped by a commitment to comprehensive, patient-centered care in a variety of clinical settings, including full-spectrum family medicine in rural Kansas, residency education, international medical missions and a local free clinic for underserved women. Now, as one of the inaugural fellows in the FACTS Fellowship in Fertility Integrative and Restorative Medicine (FIRM) , she is preparing to deepen that commitment by expanding her knowledge and skills in a cooperative reproductive endocrinology to better care for the women and men in her practice.
“For Dr. Lisa Gilbert, family medicine has always been about caring for patients across every stage of life.”
As a board-certified family physician and clinical associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine’s Via Christi Family Medicine Residency program in Wichita, Dr. Gilbert spends much of her time educating future family physicians. Her professional interests include global health, women’s health, medical ethics, and physician education, making the FACTS FIRM Fellowship a natural next step in her career.
A Career Shaped by Service
Dr. Gilbert describes herself first and foremost as a family physician whose broad interests have been shaped by a lifetime of service. Following residency, she completed an international family medicine fellowship, which took her to a rural hospital in Africa, before practicing full-spectrum family medicine in rural Kansas. While there, she cared for patients in the clinic, hospital, emergency department, and in labor and delivery settings. Fertility awareness first entered her clinical practice when she received training as a medical consultant for the Creighton FertilityCare Method at the Pope Paul VI Institute in Omaha, Nebraska.
She then moved to Wichita to join the residency faculty at Ascension Via Christi, where she has remained since 2017. Alongside her teaching responsibilities, she continues volunteering at Guadalupe Clinic—a Catholic free clinic serving uninsured patients—particularly in its women’s health clinic. She also earned a Master of Arts in Catholic Clinical Ethics from Georgetown University and serves in ethics leadership within her hospital system.
Discovering FACTS
Although Dr. Gilbert’s interest in fertility awareness began during her years practicing full-spectrum family medicine in rural Kansas, her connection to FACTS developed through an unexpected opportunity. Because of her experience in Africa, her rural hospital’s chief executive invited her to participate in a health care delivery project examining how fertility awareness-based methods could be better integrated into Rwanda’s Catholic health care system. The collaboration brought together health care leaders from around the world, including Dr. Robert Motley, a FACTS advisory council member. He later introduced her to Dr. Marguerite Duane, the executive director of FACTS, and to the organization’s mission.
Dr. Gilbert discovered that FACTS complemented her growing interest in addressing the root causes of reproductive and hormonal health issues. She completed the FACTS speaker training program and has since incorporated fertility-awareness education into family medicine residency training at her hospital.
Bringing Holistic Reproductive Medicine into Family Medicine
For Dr. Gilbert, the FACTS FIRM Fellowship is about much more than additional training. It is an opportunity to expand cooperative reproductive endocrinology within family medicine and make those skills available to future physicians. She will continue her faculty position while dedicating one day each week over the next two years to fellowship training.
“For Dr. Gilbert, the FACTS FIRM Fellowship is about much more than additional training. It is an opportunity to expand cooperative reproductive endocrinology within family medicine and make those skills available to future physicians.”
Looking ahead, she hopes to grow the cooperative hormonal and reproductive medical approach both within her practice and residency education. She believes there is strong interest among family medicine residents, many of whom also take the FACTS resident elective.
“There’s a fair number of our residents that intend to use fertility awareness in their practice, and they are interested in using restorative reproductive models to support their patients,” Dr. Gilbert said. “I would say as many as a third of our residents would specifically want this training, and I think all of them recognize a benefit.”
For physicians practicing in rural communities, applying clinical root-cause analysis can be especially important. Many patients have limited access to reproductive endocrinologists or other fertility specialists, making family physicians uniquely positioned to begin evaluating and treating underlying reproductive health concerns.
Expanding the Toolbox
One aspect of the fellowship that especially appeals to Dr. Gilbert is FACTS’ commitment to learning across approaches in fertility medicine. Rather than focusing on a single method, she appreciates that the fellowship draws on multiple evidence-based models and engages with advances in reproductive medicine more broadly.
“What I appreciate about FACTS is the openness to all appropriately designed methods of natural family planning, and similarly, the openness to the various threads of restorative reproductive medicine—taking from each the knowledge and perspective that each approach has to offer,” Dr. Gilbert said.
“One aspect of the fellowship that especially appeals to Dr. Gilbert is FACTS’ commitment to learning across approaches in fertility medicine. Rather than focusing on a single method … the fellowship draws on multiple evidence-based models and engages with advances in reproductive medicine more broadly.”
She also values the opportunity to learn from reproductive endocrinology while maintaining a restorative philosophy of care.
“There is a lot of new scientific knowledge in endocrinology that I think will be helpful in a restorative model,” Dr. Gilbert said.
She has already experienced encouraging results with basic restorative interventions and hopes to expand those skills through the fellowship.
“I’ve done minimal interventions, and so far, they’ve been successful,” she said. “I have had some patients achieve pregnancy, and it’s been really exciting!”
Multiplying the Impact
One of the unique strengths Dr. Gilbert brings to the FACTS FIRM Fellowship is her role as a residency educator. Every new skill she develops has the potential to influence not only her own patients but also the dozens of family physicians she trains.
She also sees herself contributing to the fellowship’s evolution. As one of the inaugural fellows, she hopes her experience will help refine the program for future physicians pursuing advanced training in integrative and restorative approaches to reproductive medicine.
Dr. Gilbert envisions incorporating cooperative approaches more fully into her practice, strengthening care for women within her healthcare system, and creating new opportunities for family physicians to address infertility and hormonal disorders before specialty care.
Her long-term vision also extends internationally. Drawing on years of mission work across Africa, she hopes to bring this approach to fertility care to communities where infertility often carries profound social and economic consequences and specialty care is unavailable.
“My hope is to be able to support women over there as well because they have even less access to good medical care,” Dr. Gilbert said. “They don’t have reproductive endocrinology in those countries. They don’t have other options.”
For Dr. Gilbert, the FACTS FIRM Fellowship represents an opportunity not only to grow as a clinician but also to equip future family physicians with the knowledge and confidence to provide cooperative hormonal and reproductive medicine wherever women need it most. Through her dual roles as an educator and a physician, Dr. Gilbert can extend the fellowship’s impact far beyond a single practice—reaching generations of physicians and the countless women and families they will serve.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Molly Franzonello, DNP, MHA, is a Certified Nurse Midwife (CNM) and Blog Editor at FACTS. Her clinical and editorial work focuses on fertility awareness, restorative reproductive medicine, and women’s health. Through these roles, she is committed to advancing patient-centered, evidence-based care, exploring systems and models that support this work, and expanding education on women’s fertility and health.
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