Jefferson Hospital expands services with new specialists

Jefferson Hospital is partnering with a variety of specialists to provide area residents with access to care they normally would have to travel to seek.

“When I first came back to Jefferson County three years ago, I talked about expanding our specialists,” said Hospital CEO Wendy Martin. “We appreciate every penny we get through tax-payer support and all the COVID dollars we’ve received, but having people stay local and utilize our services, that’ what is going to maintain the hospital and help us remain viable.”

She believes that expanding services, both by the hospital’s doctors and through expanding relationships with specialists who rent space locally, will sustain Jefferson Hospital into the future and encourage area residents to seek treatment they may have put off before.

In many rural areas access to reliable transportation can be a barrier to healthcare.

“Patients won’t necessarily seek treatment if they know they have to go out of town or may not do the recommended follow up,” Martin said. “Sometimes people are intimidated or not comfortable going to a bigger hospital; the parking, the finding your way around, having to travel across town to get your imaging or your lab work. It can be a lot.”

At Jefferson Hospital, those are all things they can do under one roof at a facility much closer to home.

Phase five of the funds received through the Rural Hospital Stabilization Grant were used to renovate the hospital’s specialty clinic and its six treatment rooms.

There are currently seven doctors utilizing Jefferson Hospital’s specialty clinic.

Dr. Dennis Williams with Pain Management and Rehabilitation Specialists of Augusta, has had a long relationship with Jefferson Hospital and has been seeing patients one-day-a-week there for years.

Dr. Christopher Hogan, of Doctor's Hospital in Augusta, has been holding office hours and performing surgeries at Jefferson Hospital for a little over a year.

"Dr. Hogan is interested in helping us expand,” Martin said. “He’s lengthening his days. He’s an extremely talented trauma surgeon. He loves coming out here and would like to come out here another day, and I believe we could support the volume. He’s extremely comfortable in our OR and with our staff.”

Jefferson Hospital’s Specialty Clinic has offered podiatry services before, but it has been six months or more since the last doctor moved away. Dr. Ryan Huntsman with McDuffie Podiatry and Wound Care, is new to the area, and has begun to take over those patients.

Dr. John Sarzier (neurosurgery) and Dr. Jonathan Le, both of Southeastern Spine and Pain of Waynesboro, are seeing patients in the Louisville clinic about issues with pain management.

“With pain management, we send a lot of people to Augusta,” Martin said. “Anyone who needs these procedures have to eventually go somewhere else, but it helps people to be able to come here for their initial visit, for all of their appointments. And they can have their follow up appointments here after their procedures. It’s much easier for the patient.”

Dr. David Gallagher and Dr. Richard Pope, both of Augusta-Aike Orthopedic Speclialists, are both new providers to Jefferson County.

Dr. Pope is in the Louisville clinic once a month and Dr. Gallagher twice a month.

“They provide general orthopedics,” Martin said. “Dr. Gallagher specializes in sports medicine, joint replacement, that sort of thing. Dr. Pope specializes in hand surgery.”

Before they began seeing patients in the Louisville clinic, both of these doctors were already taking referrals from Jefferson Hospital’s other clinics.

“They’re both well known to our doctors,” Martin said. “The patients were just having to drive to Augusta to see them.”

Several of the specialists are looking into coming more often to the Louisville clinic, she added.

“It all depends on the volume they are seeing,” Martin said. “For most of them, the clinics are fairly new, so they are focusing now on building that volume. Once they meet capacity on those days, we’ll probably see some of them coming more often. I believe the patient volume is here.”

All of the specialists also have privileges at Jefferson Hospital and so they can provide in-patient and emergency room consults if needed.

In addition to the small rent they pay for the space at Jefferson Hospital, the specialists are also more likely to use the hospital’s other resources such as the lab, x-rays, MRIs, CTs, physical therapy. All services that at one time the hospital was losing to competition in Augusta.

“If we can get some of these guys doing some of their minor procedures here, things they can do in our operating room, that will help us a lot,” Martin said. “And then there are our other services, like imaging. A lot of times you have to wait to get an appointment to get that done. Here, we can actually get it done almost immediately. A lot of times when the patient is seeing someone in the specialty clinic, they can send them right on over to radiology and we can get them seen that day so they don’t have to take a second day off work and drive again. It helps the patient and it helps us.”

Martin said that while there is a nurse midwife in the hospital’s prenatal clinic that provides some OBGYN services, she would like to recruit someone to provide surgical OBGYN and urology services locally. She is also currently working on getting a cardiologist for the clinic and has hopes they may be offering that service by the second quarter of next year.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Jefferson Hospital expands services with new specialists