Primary care location to open in Pikeville
By Steve Herring
Published in News on September 27, 2016 9:57 AM
PIKEVILLE -- A new primary care physician's office is scheduled to open Oct. 31 in the now closed medical office building on U.S. 117 North in Pikeville.
Wayne Memorial Hospital has leased the building from Eastern Medical Associates, said Louis Thomas, executive director of the hospital's Wayne Health Physicians.
"We are hopefully going to be there for quite some time, but we will be there for at least three years," Thomas said. "Dr. Wendy Cipriani was actually in that building several years ago. She worked for them. She will be moving up there and starting practice, starting to see patients on Oct. 31, a Monday."
Initially she will be the only physician at the office.
"We are trying to recruit a nurse practitioner to join her," Thomas said. "Then as demand builds, we probably will add additional providers. The building will house up to four providers. She will have some clinical staff to help her see patients."
The practice will be accepting new patients, and the hospital also will be sending a mailer to all current patients notifying them of the change, Thomas said.
The office will be open Mondays and Wednesdays from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
"So we are trying to offer some nontraditional hours on Mondays and Wednesdays before 9 a.m. and then after 5 p.m.," Thomas said.
The hours could change as the demand increases, he said.
"We hope that it goes in such a way that we have that need," Thomas said. "This practice is under the Wayne Physicians umbrella. So the practice is called Wayne Health Family Medicine. It has two locations. It has this location (Pikeville) then it also has a location in Goldsboro (Dr. Clement Lee McCaskill).
"But it is a hospital-employed physician practice. The reason we wanted to be up there, the hospital does a medical staff needs assessment every year or two. They look at a lot of different things about the medical staff."
The study looks at age, where staff members are located, the types of specialties the hospital has and the type of specialties it may need as defined by the population, he said.
"It was identified that there is a need for primary care physicians up in the northern end of the county," Thomas said. "We are trying to meet that need. The hospital is not trying to acquire practices. That is not the goal.
"The only reason they (hospitals) employ physician practices is to keep the physicians in the community. So there are a lot of reasons why hospitals, particularly this hospital, will employ physicians. But, we don't want any physicians leaving the community. We don't want to lose physicians if we can help it. If it is something, like they are having a hard time running the practices, that is something that we can help with."
That is the main reason for the hospital to have physician practices, Thomas said.
Another reason is that most physicians coming out of training want to be employed and not have to manage the business side of a practice, he said.
"With all of the changes, the government regulations, insurance companies, the business is very complex," Thomas said. "It gets more and more complex every day and every year. So physicians are kind of reluctant to give up ownership. But then they come to us often and say, 'We don't know if we can continue to manage. We are looking to be employed.' That is the primary reason we employ physician practices."
"We really want to have a thriving primary care practice on the northern end of the county. So if anybody is looking to schedule an appointment, we will be running ads in the newspaper. I would encourage people to call and try to get in."