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Making house calls is their specialty
By JANE BOKUN © St. Petersburg Times, published January 16, 2001 TAMPA -- Janet Carra faced the prospect of a long hospital stay when debilitating heart and lung problems made it difficult for her to get to the doctor's office. Then she found a doctor who makes house calls. "They worked with me and found a doctor I think is great," she said recently from her Carrollwood home. Carra, 62, is a typical patient visited by a roving MD to You medical van on its daily rounds. The company will make a house call for a common cold or flu, but has built a patient base of seniors and shut-ins with chronic illnesses and people with debilitating diseases. "We see a lot of people who can't get out and don't have much independence," said Dr. Mark Reiheld, a Carrollwood general practitioner who works for MD to You. In a day, Reiheld may see a dozen patients from St. Petersburg to Winter Haven, tooling around with a medical assistant and visiting assisted living centers and private homes. The company owns five vans equipped with X-ray machines and other equipment typically found in a doctor's office. The company started in Boca Raton five years ago and now has additional offices in St. Petersburg and Tampa to cover Central Florida. Each office has three doctors, three medical assistants and three nurses. "Our doctors are doing medicine the old-fashioned way," said Roger Brown, president of Mobile Medical Industries, the investment group that owns MD to You. Brown said MD to You has about 5,000 regular patients and handles 3,000 home visits in a typical month. The average patient is 85 years old, he said. "I saw a great need in communities on the West Coast," Brown said. "There are a lot of people who are difficult to transport and are stuck in their homes." A visit costs about the same as a trip to the doctor's office for someone with insurance, Brown said. "Our mission is to keep patients out of the emergency room," Brown said. "We actually save Medicare a tremendous amount of money and save the patients anguish by not having to wait in the emergency room."
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