May 2002

Text Box: Welcome Hello to all. I would like to introduce Jeff & Katie Caba, Physician Assistants. They have joined me so I can better serve our patients. I would also like to announce our move April 29th into our new office building. It is located off the traffic circle at the Century Drive / Colorado Street intersection. Take the Chandler exit off the circle to Yates Ave. and we are on the corner of Nancy Way/Yates. A map can be obtained at our current facility or web site. The building will house multiple organizations. We are leasing space to a Laboratory who will collect specimens and return to us results from their satellite facility. We have also leased space to In-Med, a company run by Dr. Frost Lee that provides business tools and software to physician offices and provides consulting services to the Healthcare Industry. We are currently exploring publishing our newsletter on our web site and sending it to our patients with e-mail addresses. If this is successful, we will be able to do more frequent Newsletters and keep all our patients more informed. This Newsletter will provide a brief practice description as well as review what a PA (Physician Assistant) does for patients, discuss what Internal Medicine is as a specialty, and finally explain what is unique about Ponderosa Medical. We encourage you to share your positive experiences regarding your healthcare with others so that we can grow and add more physicians and PAs to the practice. Look for our upcoming letter on sun safety. product and services description Ponderosa Medical sells primary care health care services to adults and adolescents. We provide all the services a typical Internal Medicine practice provides plus services that are unique. We use Physician Assistants to extend the services and expertise of our physicians. We do in office exercise cardiac stress testing, skin surveys and biopsies, excisions, or destruction of skin cancers or pre-malignant lesions. We treat warts and acne. We do Women’s Health treating perimenopausal and postmenopausal issues as well as vaginal infections. We do PAP smears, and breast examinations. We strongly believe in preventative health examinations and coach healthy lifestyle practice. We do school sport’s examinations, employer screening exams, and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) commercial exams. We treat colds, pneumonias, and urinary tract infections. We treat diabetes, congestive heart failure, emphysema, and reflux esophagitis… just to name a few of the things. What is a Physician Assistant A Physician Assistant is a health professional licensed by the state to practice medicine under the supervision of a physician. PAs provide a broad range of medical services that have traditionally been performed by physicians. As a member of the medical team, PAs diagnose and treat illness, order and interpret laboratory studies, order diagnostic imaging tests and prescribe medications. Close consultation between the PA and physician ensures continuity of care. PAs are taught to know when it is appropriate to have the patient evaluated by the physician. Physician assistants are often referred to as “Physician Extenders”

PONDEROSA MEDICAL'S
NEWSLETTER

Text Box: or “Mid-level Practitioners”. The typical physician assistant has a bachelor’s degree and four years of health care experience before obtaining a Master’s degree in a formal 2-year Physician Assistant training program. What is an Internist An Internist trains 3 to 5 years after medical school focusing on diagnosis and treatment of internal diseases. That time is focused on hospital and outpatient Internal Medicine subspecialties of Cardiology (heart), Pulmonology (lung), Gastroenterology (liver & bowel), Nephrology (kidneys), Hematology (blood), Oncology (cancer), Rheumatology (arthritis), Immunology (allergies), Neurology (nerves & brain), Infectious Disease (infections), and Endocrinology (hormones, diabetes). Time is also spent with Dermatology and clinical Gynecology. Internal Medicine is not Pediatrics, Obstetrics, Surgery, Orthopedics, Ophthalmology, or Radiology. It differs from Family Practice only in that Family Practitioners spend 3 years in training divided between Internal Medicine and all the specialties Internal Medicine is not. Their training is more divided and less focused. As a consequence, Internists frequently manage sicker and more complex patients as they have multi-system illnesses. Sub-specialists such as Cardiologists only look at and treat heart specific issues and defer other system illness to other sub-specialists. A patient with multiple sub-specialist physician care often gets fragmented care without the whole patient approach which is what general Internal Medicine is all about. What Makes Ponderosa Medical Unique Ponderosa Medical uses modern networked computer tools to improve information flow throughout the organization. This efficiency is translated into increased face-to-face time with patients giving them the old fashioned medical practice of caring and availability. The following is what we tell our patients about our services: Your records are immediately available Ponderosa Medical uses CompletePractice software allowing for a paperless medical practice. Your medical records are always just a second away from any workstation in the office. You will never again need to be seen without your medical record available. In a large medical clinic in Oregon it has been documented that 30% of all patient encounters were done without locating the paper chart. That leads to unnecessary lab and diagnostic re-testing and errors in prescribing medications. Time is a valued Commodity At Ponderosa Medical, the professional staff values their time equally with that of yours. This means that we try hard to stay on schedule. We use an electronic scheduling system. It time-stamps the arrival of patients, and monitors how long you have waited in the reception room or exam room. It logs the time the physician spends with you and the time you leave the office. We statistically can document that we see patients within 5 minutes of their appointment time. We do this because we know that your satisfaction is directly related to the time you spent waiting. Dr. Lee is known for greeting his patients in the reception room and escorting them to the examination room when his nurse is busy. This is only possible because the scheduling system notifies everyone when the patient arrives. Sharing of Personal Healthcare Information At Ponderosa Medical, we strongly believe that your medical record has