The new Clark Clinic opened its doors to patients for the first time this morning in the Medical Office Plaza adjacent to the Clark Regional Medical Center.
The clinic, located on the second floor of the new facility, will have three new pediatricians, Mary Beth Doyle, Gregory Rupp and CaraLee Blair, as well as new family medicine practitioners Stacy Taylor-Hunt, Michelle Carpenter and Winni Hopkins.
Clark Regional C.E.O. Kathy Love said the new providers were not there to replace existing family physicians but to add to the availability of family health care in Clark County.
“When we started planning long-term for the hospital, we did an assessment and looked at how hard it was to get into primary practices,” Love said. “In planning for the future,” Love said. “We wanted to encompass the existing primary care physicians and expand where we needed to in order to make health care more convenient for patients.
“We are blessed in this community to have wonderfully strong, good primary care doctors. This is not just about the clinic, it’s about the need for additional primary care. My goal is to get everybody’s practice full and we can just keep bringing in more as people fill up.”
While the physicians are new to Clark County, they are all from Kentucky and are familiar to the region, Love said.
“We’ve been really fortunate that all of our doctors have been trained in central Kentucky or getting back to central Kentucky. That means they are familiar with the area and they want to be here,” Love said.
The clinic is designed to provide for the health care needs of the entire family and will provide same-day and after-hours appointments.
The Clark Clinic is the first of several medical services that will be open in the Medical Office Plaza in the next couple of months. The Clark Immediate Care Clinic, which is currently located on the Bypass, will consolidate with the Clark Clinic on the second floor of the office plaza in late October.
The hospital’s Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Center also will move from the Bypass to the first floor of the office plaza at the end of September, as well as a new speciality clinic for specialists who rotate one or two days per week with the hospital, such as a pulmonologists and sleep therapy physicians.
The Women’s Diagnostic Center, which is currently located in the hospital, will open on the first floor of the office plaza in early October.
Having multiple services at one location near the hospital will make it much more convenient for patients, Love said.
“We are trying to do a lot of streamlining. People are busy. People need to get back to work and people need to get their primary needs taken care of so we are trying to make that as convenient as possible,” Love said. “We want to make it easy for the patient. That’s our ultimate goal. We will eventually get everybody on campus because it makes it easier to get your x-rays, get your labs done, see your primary care doctor or whatever.”
Clark Regional’s Coumadin Clinic is not moving and will remain at its current location on the Bypass.
Love said the clinic is a new option for patients without primary care doctors and those who are currently traveling to Lexington for care.
“We don’t want patients to switch primary care doctors,” Love said. “We want people to be happy. If they are one of the ones who either drive into Lexington or are just rolling the dice until they get something terrible, we want to sing the praises and the importance of building that relationship with a primary care doctor when they are healthy, before they get sick and need one and don’t have one.”
For more information about the clinic or to schedule an appointment, call 737-6480.
Contact Bob Flynn at bflynn@winchestersun.com.
