It’s a sunny Monday afternoon, and Dr. Timotheus Watson of Akron Children’s Hospital is getting ready to examine a baby born with a hole in her heart. Her foster parents are hoping for good news. “Thanks for fixing yourself,” he tells the baby as she coos up at him. He’s clearly enjoying delivering this bit of good news; the hole in her heart closed up on its own. Then it’s on to a toddler who passed out while sick and crying, a girl who fainted at the mall and then a newborn whose heart chambers developed in reverse. The pediatric cardiologist examines all of them with devotion. He listens to their heartbeats and gently measures their pulse on their bare feet, tickles them lightly and jokes with their parents.
On a typical day, Watson, a pediatric cardiologist, sees 10-12 patients like this. Many cases are routine like kids crying so much they hold their breath and pass out. Others are more nuanced, like the baby with reversed heart chambers who will need complex surgery at some point in her life. But where he sees all these patients is less typical.
He’s in Beachwood on Monday. On Tuesdays, he’s in North Canton or at the Mahoning Valley office doing prenatal scans. On Wednesdays, he’s usually in Warren, on Thursdays he’s typically in Mansfield and on Fridays he heads to Akron or Canton. Throw in the occasional week of hospital duty, and you’ve got one unpredictable schedule.
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Watson doesn’t mind this nomadic work week.
“I applaud Akron Children’s saying, look, we’re going to go where the families are, try to make appointments convenient, try to put the focus on the patient,” he says.
Watson is part of an effort by Akron Children’s to make sure doctors are where the patients are. It’s not quite a house call, but it’s a conscious effort to make sure patients don’t have to drive too far to reach their doctor’s office. The hospital system has set up pediatric offices and emergency centers all around Northern Ohio, and specialists like Watson drive around between various offices to meet patients close to their homes.
Pediatric nurse practitioner Rachael Passodelis, who works with Watson in Beachwood on Mondays, enjoys the variety the outreach program offers.
“I like the changeup a little bit, to be honest, because I think it makes each day a little bit different,” she says.
In any given week, she’ll work out of offices in Boston Heights, North Canton, Medina, Mansfield, Norwalk, Akron or Beachwood. Still, at the end of a long day, nobody looks forward to a long drive home.
“(My) favorite place is the one that’s always closest to home, to be honest because some of these locations are so far that the days I get to be at a really close location makes it easy,” she says.
Dr. J.R. Bockoven, the director of outreach at Akron Children’s Heart Center and a pediatric cardiologist, coordinates with Watson, Passodelis and the rest of the traveling doctors. He says it takes a certain kind of person to become an outreach physician, someone who can be flexible and work off of a main campus where they “don’t have all the resources.”
He tells doctors he’s recruiting that “you’ve got to love to drive, or not hate to drive; let’s just put it that way.”
Bockoven joined Akron Children’s in 2003. Now, his mission is to expand the hospital system’s network far and wide, and he practices what he preaches. He sees patients at offices in Beachwood, Medina, Mansfield, Marietta, North Canton and Wooster.
When I caught him by phone, he was in his car driving back from New Philadelphia. He said he put 38,000 miles on a new car in the first year of driving it.
A map on the hospital system’s website shows a web of offices filling up the state’s Northeastern quadrant. By now, you can find Akron Children’s offices as far west as Mansfield and out east near the Pennsylvania border in East Liverpool and Lowellville. There are offices as far north as Mayfield Heights on the East Side, Lorain on the West and as far south as Belpre and Marietta, by the West Virginia border. They’re not quite content with that; Bockoven said they’re working on opening up a new regional center in Medina within the year.
“If we were just at Akron Children’s, everyone can come from all of these places up to Akron, but they’re driving upwards from an hour, to two and a half hours,” Bockoven says. “If we can have clinics closer to home, then we can provide the same level of care closer to their home, which is better for a lot of different things: for patient access, for patients being able to keep the appointments, for patient satisfaction.”
It makes life easier for patients.
“Patients love it,” he says. “They love when you have the expertise closer to home and you don’t have to drive so far.”
Nearby access to specialty physicians is especially important for folks living in rural parts of the state where the closest specialist could be several hours away, and some patients with complicated conditions need to see their doctors frequently. Watson says he has patients for whom he drives an hour to see, and they still have to drive an hour or more to get to him. Being closer to those folks is “invaluable,” he says, and “helps with outcomes too.”
It’s also easier for patients to navigate smaller, suburban and rural offices than the often labyrinthine main campuses that anchor many large hospital systems, he says.
“You drove up, you parked, the office is right there; it’s not some huge garage structure that’s charging $15 to park and then you’re trying to navigate,” he said. “It makes a huge difference to just be able to go in walk up the steps come to our office.”
He knew what he was getting into when he accepted the position last January. In fact, it decreased his driving time. He’d previously worked at an Atlanta-
based system that served 22 offices around Georgia. He recalls Bockoven warning him about all the time he’d have to spend in his car and thinking, “That’s kind of right up my alley right now, just with less traffic.”
“I’ve been doing that in one of the busiest cities in the country, driving, you know, being stuck in traffic,” he recalls. “I was like, this is going to be a breeze.”
A self-proclaimed “electric vehicle nerd,” he spends hours on the road listening to podcasts about electric vehicles.
He said it helps that Akron Children’s appreciates all the driving he has to do, and incorporates the time it takes for him to be on the road into his daily schedule.
“If it’s a real remote clinic, our days end a little bit earlier, so we’re not getting home at 8 p.m.,” he says.
There are additional accommodations to ensure clinicians don’t get burned out, too. Watson particularly likes an AI system the hospital recently invested in that takes notes for him during visits. Previously, he’d have to spend another hour or two catching up on clinical notes after he got home.
“For me, being here, what attracted me was kind of getting some of my time back,” he says. That became especially important to him once he became a parent. He has two daughters who, at his old job, used to complain that he works all the time.
“Being there for dinner is everything to me right now,” he says. “It’s just a simple thing: I want to see them before they go to bed, have dinner and hang out.” Though, he admits, they might prefer to play with their dolls.
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