My Story

I was fresh out of residency and fell in love with their tiny office located in an old two story building in downtown Concord. Their practice appealed to me as it was two docs and one secretary and they did all the patient care them-selves without nurses or other staff. I was also impressed by how few calls they received after hours while at dinner on my interview. Other interviews had been interrupted by multiple phone calls that often seemed for very minor illnesses. My soon to be partners told me that their patients knew when to call them as they spent time explaining what was an emergency and what could wait ’til the next day’s office hours. They also related that they had a 2 hour call in block every day where patients knew they could call and ask the docs questions. I was sold!

My years since then have been very busy. As the first woman in the practice I brought in some GYN skills for the teen girls and some newer ways of dealing with common childhood illnesses such as asthma. As the years went by we did gain another male partner and a nursing assistant as well as another secretary.

About a decade ago we moved to an office on the hospital campus to make life more convenient. For most of my years of practice we also admitted to and rounded in the local hospital every day. We cared for routine dehydration, asthma and infectious disease in our inpatients as well as stabilizing critically ill children and infants until they could be transported to a tertiary medical center. Despite all the work our practice remained homey and a place where the patients felt they knew and trusted all the physicians and the APRN we added along the way.

Today we only do social rounds at the hospital as we have a full staff of pediatric hospitalists. The other group in town doesn’t even go in to the hospital to see patients even on a social basis now. We are much larger but still only have two nurses and one nursing asst. We have 10 front office staff now but that is well below most practices our size. We have grown to six doctors (two are 3/4 time) and two APRN’s but still maintain a level of care where all the providers are aware of our more complicated patients. We remain fiercely independent and negotiate all our own fees with insurers as well as do our own billing in house. Our schedules can be flexible when we need them to and we are all happy with our income and benefits. We do not have an EMR as of yet and plan to stay with paper charts as long as possible.

We do live by our state motto “ Live Free or Die” and are very happy with our private practice. I do believe we are the only private pediatric practice of our size remaining in NH.

So that’s my story!