NCCL Leader Says Advocacy Work
‘Fills My Cup’
April 22, 2025, David Mitchell — Peony Khoo, M.D., IBCLC, FAAFP, knew what she was getting into when she picked a career in health care.
“My mother was a nephrologist,” Khoo said. “She was excited that I was interested in medicine, but at the same time, she tempered my expectations. She said, ‘Make sure that you really, really like it if you're going to go this route.’ She definitely was a dedicated physician to her patients. I saw her working literally 365 days a year, including holidays and taking call.”
Khoo keeps an interesting schedule, too.
In addition to serving as associate program director at the family medicine residency at Dignity Health California Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles, she has adjunct assistant professor roles at in the Departments of Family Medicine and Obstetrics and Gynecology at Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.
“I think for me it’s about seeing a learner grow so dramatically,” she said of her interest in academic medicine. “It’s a pretty remarkable evolution over a relatively short amount of time. Being able to expose them to full-scope family medicine is enriching, especially giving them that opportunity to see patients in different settings. For example, we take care of pregnant patients in clinic, then deliver them in labor and delivery, then see them back in the clinic where we’re also taking care of their baby.”
Khoo is vice chair of the AAFP’s Obstetrics Member Interest Group, past chair of the Reproductive Health Member Interest Group and the Academy’s liaison to the Southern California cluster of the Reproductive Health Access Project.
“Once I finished training and settled into my job, I felt a need to stay connected with my passion in reproductive health, in advocacy and all these other aspects of family medicine that make family medicine what it is to me,” said Khoo, whose husband is family physician Phillip Brown, M.D. “This is how I meet those needs for myself in addition to trying to get other people excited about family medicine.”
Khoo is currently serving the AAFP and the California AFP on commissions and committees, and is an officer in the Los Angeles AFP.
“My involvement in all of these organizations has really helped fill my cup in ways beyond what my day job is able to do,” she said. “It helps me stay in tune with my purpose and the things that keep me energized. It helps me consider how I can move the needle beyond the exam room. It is a fair amount of time commitment and additional duties, but it also helped me prevent burnout because it helps me keep that joy in medicine.”
Khoo also is a member constituency alternate delegate to Congress of Delegates and will serve as co-convener of the women’s constituency when the National Conference of Constituency Leaders meets April 24-26 in Kansas City, Missouri. That event is a leadership development event for women, minorities, new physicians, international medical graduates, and LGBTQ+ physicians and allies.
“I love the energy in the room and how passionate people are about improving our organization, improving care for our patients and that they want to do something about it,” she said.
Khoo tries to pass her passion and energy to students and residents.
“It’s been really great to plug them into our local and our state chapter activities, especially our California Academy of Family Physicians All Member Advocacy meeting, which is set up in a way that is very learner friendly and open to anyone at any level,” she said. “There are a lot of scholarship opportunities offered to help support residents and students. Once I get a resident to attend one of those events, usually they are a return attendee in the future because it’s a great, energetic environment.”
Khoo’s own path to family medicine started late in her senior year at USC. She had worked as an emergency medical technician as an undergraduate and had an interest in emergency medicine. That started to change during her last semester when Jo Marie Reilly, M.D., M.P.H., spoke to her class about family medicine.
“She’s well known in the family medicine world and has had an impact on innumerable students,” Khoo said. “She painted a picture of being a personal physician for a patient in a long-term relationship and the family medicine approach to care, handling any issue her patients bring up and following her patients across care settings. She has been seeing patients at the clinic that I work at now for decades. When I came back and took this job, I reached out to her and let her know that she was the one who got me into family medicine. It’s been fun, working with her and talking about how much we still love family medicine.”