From Alaska to Oregon-Champion of Community Oriented Primary Care. LJ’s practice, Dunes Family Health Care on the Oregon coast, was one of the 13 model rural practices funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Rural Practice Project in 1977.  In 1993 he joined the Department of Family Medicine at Oregon Health and Science University.  In 2002, LJ was selected to start a practice-based research network at OHSU, the Oregon Rural Practice-based Research Network (ORPRN).  In 2005 Dr. Fagnan was named “Family Doctor of the Year” by the Oregon Academy of Family Physicians.  He has been an investigator on 50 ORPRN studies with a principal investigator role in 20 of these studies.  Co-author of a landmark paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association(2007), “Practice-Based Research— ‘Blue Highways’ on the NIH Roadmap”.  LJ’s research portfolio includes studies and publications related to population-based health, dissemination and implementation of evidence-based medicine into practice, quality improvement, and rural health care systems. 

He was the co-director of the Certificate Program in Practice-Based Research Methods Fellowship.  The inaugural 2015-2016 program graduated 16 fellows.  The 2016-2017 program accepted 54 fellows from Canada and the United States.  LJ was the founding director of the Meta-network Learning And Research Center (MetaLARC), a consortium of seven practice-based research networks in Canada and the United States.  Dr. Fagnan retired as director of ORPRN in 2018 and from OHSU in 2023.

Lyle (LJ) Fagnan is Professor Emeritus of Family Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). He was a general medical officer in the Indian Health Service in Bethel, Alaska and a family physician in rural Oregon. Among his many achievements, he is best known internationally for the Oregon Rural Practice-based Research Network