MyChoice Medical Clinic, recently opened in Burton Village, is not just a community healthcare office.
MyChoice Medical Clinic, recently opened in Burton Village, is not just a community healthcare office.
Ruth Skocic hopes it will provide a springboard for her electronic personal health record program she said will improve and streamline patient treatment across the healthcare industry.
The clinic, a multi-specialty group practice, includes certified nurse practitioners, Mandy Picone and Kristin Zalar, who work with Dr. Eugene Pogorelec and Dr. Kim Cooley to provide general healthcare.
Besides seeing walk-in patients Tuesday through Saturday at 14525 North Cheshire Street, the staff will make house calls for the homebound within a mile of the village, said Picone.
Children 18-months and older can be treated, but infants should see a pediatrician, she said.
Appointments are preferred and take precedence, but the facility can handle urgent care visits for any age, Picone added.
This is the second MyChoice clinic, with another located in Hiram, where Ruth, CEO of parent company My Life Plan Holdings Inc., lives.
MyChoice fields mobile clinics that visit senior centers around Geauga County on a regular basis, Picone said.
Case manager Evan Skocic, the Ruth’s son, also handles advertising for the growing operation.
“A lot of times people don’t know what their resources are,” Picone said.
There are many agencies through which they can get help with food or utilities once Evan helps them find those resources.
“Evan’s goal is to reach out to other agencies. That mostly happens at the senior centers,” Picone said.
Ruth, who spent many years working in the mental health field in Portage County, has built the ability to help patients beyond medical care into the MyChoice system.
When a large mental health facility in Akron shut down, the medical community became crowded with individuals who didn’t have their records handy when they needed care, creating a serious gap in care, Ruth said.
“The first responders would come to a facility and the patient’s history was unknown,” she said, adding there were often no guardians to speak for the patients. For instance, if someone had a life-threatening issue and went to the emergency room, no one knew if they had a do-not-resuscitate request.
Although she has no medical experience, Ruth said she knew there shouldn’t be gaps like that and she set about solving that problem.
“I invented one of the first universal electronic records programs,” she said.
Once she had it put together, her efforts to convince hospitals and the medical community met with rejection. Her arguments that it would save patients and medical facilities time and potential errors, help identify victims and facilitate reuniting parents with their children were met with skepticism.
“They didn’t want to share medical records,” Ruth said, even though the records are really the property of the patient.
For 10 years, Ruth fine-tuned the electronic personal health record system, but had little success marketing it.
“I just wanted to take care of people and save lives,” she said.
Finally, someone suggested she might have better luck if she just started her own brick-and-mortar medical practice.
“I said ‘I can do that?’” Ruth recalls.
It took time, money and cutting through red tape, but she was able to establish My Life Plan and the first clinic a few years ago
Today, MyChoice provides each of its patients with a business-card-sized record, including identity, medications, conditions and a computer chip that, combined with the patient’s fingerprint attached to a computer accessory, gives his or her provider all the information they need.
“This streamlines (the process) from the onset of an emergency,” Ruth said, adding a first responder can put the victim’s finger on the pad and obtain all the information necessary for emergency treatment.
That information is updated every three months by the MyChoice staff with a personal phone call to the patient, she said.
“Our patients automatically get a card. They love it,” Picone said, adding the card might result in the patient not having to fill out pages of questions when they go see a new doctor.
There are many regulations and safeguards that are followed, making the process 99.9 percent accurate and secure, Picone said.
She hopes emergency personnel and hospitals will learn to appreciate the efficiency of the “smart cards” and realize the system is not a threat, Picone said.
Ruth said she chose Geauga for MyChoice partly because she was born in the county and knows how friendly people are, but also because she wanted to offer medical support to the Amish population.
In addition, there are people in Geauga who are living below the poverty line, but may not qualify for Medicaid and cannot afford insurance. For those people, MyChoice has a sliding payment scale tied to the government guidelines, she said.
For more information, call the office at 440-273-8093.
