Highland Family Medicine Completes Expansion
June 26, 2012
Dr. Tom Campbell with a patient
Highland Family Medicine (HFM) completed an expansion project at its South Clinton Avenue practice with the opening of a new clinical suite Monday. The project is part of a larger, comprehensive plan to address a primary care physician shortage in the community that is expected to worsen as the population ages and more people become insured under health care reform.
"We welcomed 3,000 new patients to Family Medicine in the past year," said Thomas Campbell, M.D., Chair of the Department of Family Medicine and associate director of the Center for Primary Care at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC). "This expansion allows us to treat those new patients and also to train new physicians who are providing care to them."
HFM expanded its clinical, training and administrative space by 30 percent. The addition brings the total number of clinical suites in the practice from six to seven. (Each clinical suite includes multiple exam rooms and consists of family physicians, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, suite managers, medical assistants, and team secretaries.) The practice also expanded its teaching and administrative office space into a renovated adjacent building earlier this year. Cornhill Internal Medicine, which had a practice within the HFM facility, moved to the neighboring building as well, making room for HFM to add the seventh clinical suite.
The HFM expansion is part of a larger, on-going plan with URMC’s Department of Family Medicine to address the primary care physician shortage. The Department of Family Medicine Residency Program has been training more doctors in the primary care field: The Department began accepting two additional residents into its program in 2011 and will continue to do so each year through 2015. In addition, the Department hired five new faculty physicians in the past two years to provide training to residents and care for new patients at HFM.
"The number of primary care doctors is still woefully inadequate to meet demand and need, but we’re seeing an improvement," Dr. Campbell said. "Our goal is to place more primary care doctors in the community and provide high quality, cost-effective care to the underserved."
HFM had more than 50,000 patient visits in fiscal year 2012.
The practice is located at 777 South Clinton Avenue. Appointments can be made at (585) 279-4800.