In the mid 1980s, New York Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia University Medical Center created the Ambulatory Care Network (ACN) in response to the need for primary care services in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. This network of neighborhood-based health centers includes the primary teaching site for the Residency Program located on 158th Street and Morgan Place: Family Medicine at Herman "Denny" Farrell, Jr. Community Health Center.

The Health Center utilizes the team approach to care. Each team consists of attending faculty family practitioners and/or a family nurse practitioner, a resident from each training year, a team nurse and rotating patient representatives and medical assistants. Each team functions as a unit that strives for the successful and timely provision of quality care. Physicians in the team function as members of a group practice, cross-covering patient phone calls, seeing each other’s patients in emergency situations, and sharing on-call responsibilities. Throughout their 3 years of training, residents work alongside their team’s physician providers and support staff. They learn how to be responsible for managing the health care of not only their patient and patient’s families but those of their team members too.

The Health Center provides residents with fully equipped examination rooms, each with a computer workstation and printer. It has a specially equipped procedure room where residents learn numerous skills, including office skin procedures, colposcopy and other gynecological procedures. Residents have the opportunity to participate in the Health Center’s HIV/AIDS care, home visits, the musculoskeletal, Early Options, gastroenterology, psychiatry, and podiatry clinics, and Integrative Care Conferences. Residents also learn to provide care while actively using the electronic medical record and a Web-based clinical information system which permits immediate access to laboratory results, specialty clinic consults, inpatient activity and web based medical references. Residents can retrieve this patient information and laboratory results as well as access medical literature, demographic data bases, and the Internet 24 hours a day from any PC located within New York-Presbyterian Hospital and in their home.

The Health Center has a Conference Room which is the venue for the weekly Family Medicine Residency core curriculum lectures, the Outpatient Morning report, faculty and/or resident business meetings as well as community or patient or medical student teaching conferences. Residents can easily take advantage of many Health resources available to them from the internet, the onsite library with its numerous reference books and residency teaching video systems.