My Role
I have a variety of roles at Monument Health. The first is in the Intensive Care Unit where I care for some of our sickest patients. The ICU tends to be fast paced and usually requires cooperative care with multiple other specialties. When I’m not in the ICU, I can usually be found either in the clinic or the hospital taking care of pulmonary patients. Pulmonary medicine has a different flavor of care, often with patients with more chronic and complex diseases like COPD and pulmonary fibrosis. Lastly, I’m the Medical Director for Respiratory Therapy. Our respiratory therapists are crucial for taking care of all of our patients with respiratory disease.
My Goal
My goal is always to help patients and families navigate through their illnesses. Sometimes that’s accomplished directly through my care of the patient; other times it may be as part of the team, or making sure the patient gets connected to the right services. Part of that goal has been to expand our pulmonary services in order to ensure the Black Hills continues having access to high-quality pulmonary care. In the last few years, that has included developing our EBUS program, and more recently an addition of robotic navigational bronchoscopy with the ION system. Both of these help with our pulmonary diagnostics, particularly in the area of llung cancer.
My Passion
My passion, as it relates to being a physician, is making a difference. That may be as simple as prescribing a medicine for a patient so they can breathe easier or listening to a patient’s stresses in an effort to alleviate them. It may be more complex, like helping to launch an ION program so that patients with lung cancer can get their diagnosis and staging more efficiently and get to treatment faster. As a physician, I feel I have a responsibility to try to make life better for my patients, my coworkers and my community. Ultimately making an impact, great or small, in people’s lives gives me great joy.