All in the Family

Photography by James Moore

Greatness attracts greatness. Iron sharpens iron. Birds of a feather flock together. Such folksy idioms describe what happens when two successful entities come together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. And they perfectly illustrate the conjoining of Ozarks Family Healthcare and longtime family practice clinic Ozarks Family Care of West Plains, a move started last year and made official in May. 

“We are thrilled to welcome the Ozarks Family Care team of caregivers to Ozarks Healthcare,” said Tom Keller, Ozarks Healthcare president and CEO. “Their experience and compassion are well-known in our community, and we are honored to add the skills of their providers and staff to our team. 

“Together, we will add to our capacity of serving our community under one unified health system with multiple specialties. We anticipate being able to grow our focus on our community’s health with combined compassionate care from both organizations.”

“This is an opportunity to truly make a positive impact on a large scale, affecting thousands of people, which is rare,” said Dr. Scott Roush, Ozarks Family Care co-founder. “We felt the best way to achieve our goals was to join forces in a united effort to navigate the multiple directions medical care is moving. It is an exciting endeavor, but daunting as well, and many challenges lay ahead. 

“I look forward to the challenging work that is coming and the reward of seeing the health and productivity of a community evolve and improve.”

For nearly two decades, Ozarks Family Care has been a fixture in the West Plains community, providing primary care and wellness services. Roush founded the firm with Dr. Jason Spurling, the clinic’s practice manager, in 2004 with the intent of delivering the utmost in patient-centered care and customer service.

“Dr. Roush and I were both in residency together at Cox in Springfield and we graduated together,” Spurling said. “This is actually his hometown and he recruited me back here. We evaluated that there definitely was a need; this was a health provider shortage area in the state, and they had a few doctors who had just retired. They definitely had a shortage of primary care providers.”

Like many ventures, the family practice clinic had its share of doubters that it would last very long. But the two physicians proceeded anyway, convinced that if they built their clinic on the medical model they had in mind. the people would find them. 

“We had a lot of people who didn’t feel like we would be successful here,” Spurling said. “Quite frankly, we felt like if we did it we had to do it for the right reasons and if we did that, it would all work out. We prayed about it a lot and we felt like God opened a lot of doors for us in getting started and we just kind of kept that our focus. This is kind of like a ministry for us as much as anything and we’ve in turn been really blessed by it.”

The founders’ dual foundational strategy of strictly managing overhead costs while splurging on customer service and personal attention has held up over the years. In fact, it was so well-received it  led to expansion considerably sooner than forecast.

“It definitely grew much faster than we expected,” Spurling said. “A normal ramp-up would be four to five years. We were full within the first two to three years.”

Spurling said the clinic has never even actively looked for additional physicians but have been blessed by providers who shared their same philosophy finding them. 

“We did bring in a couple other physicians through the years, individuals who had done some rotations with us in residency and who liked what we did,” Spurling said. “They had similar values and similar feelings towards health and the right way to take care of patients. We mutually agreed they fit in well from that standpoint.”

Over its long and fruitful practice, now known as Ozarks Healthcare Family Care, the clinic grew from the original partners to include four physicians, two family nurse practitioners and a support staff of eight. Along the way, the clinic developed a mutually positive working relationship with Ozarks Healthcare as well.

“We’ve always had a good working relationship with the hospital and working over there in the hospital setting and in the OB unit as well,” Spurling said. “We’ve had a lot of interactions over the years and the hospital was very supportive of us when we got started as well. 

“Ozarks Healthcare has done a lot to bring in a lot of good specialists and improve their facilities and they’ve brought in some other people who have really made some positive changes to help the community as a whole.”

Ozark Family Care wasn’t necessarily looking to join forces with anybody, Spurling said, but when Ozarks Healthcare leadership broached the idea last year, it brought with it too many potential benefits to ignore. 

“From our standpoint, obviously they’re a much bigger organization with a lot of resources that we don’t have,” Spurling said. “This really does allow us the opportunity to coordinate our care much better with the specialists at the hospital. That ability to coordinate and get testing done in a more timely manner is a big asset. 

“Technology is another area where we can benefit. Their patient portal is something that they’ve invested a lot of time and resources in and it’s really, really helpful as a result of that. Telemedicine is something we were kind of just dipping our toes into prior to this, but Ozarks Healthcare definitely has a more robust system and they’ve got plans for even a better system coming down the pipeline. That’s an area that will definitely be an advantage for us and something we just wouldn’t be able to do on our own.”

Like all good partnerships, Ozarks Healthcare is benefiting from the addition of the family practice as well, hoping to strengthen its own patient-facing processes and procedures by borrowing from the clinic’s model. Spurling will have a front-row seat to that effort, having been named Medical Director of Primary Care for the larger organization, through which he will have a hand in assessing and enhancing the overall patient experience, especially when it comes to receiving quality, compassionate care.

“I’m basically going to help with implementing new policies, standardizing all the primary care in the organization including the rural clinics, helping with recruitment of new providers and developing onboarding and education protocols for them as well,” he said of his new role. 

“I think a bigger part of what I’m trying to accomplish is bringing a patient-centered focus to primary care system-wide. It’s not to say it’s not there now but we’ll be looking at ways to strengthen that and then looking at how we can collaborate better with our specialty and patient physicians. This will result in better coordination of care throughout the whole system.”

For all of the change that the move represents, Spurling said the practice’s patients will still experience the same attentive care under the new arrangement as they always have, in some ways made better and easier to navigate having officially come under the Ozarks Healthcare umbrella. He pledged the same passion and commitment to the community that brought the clinic into reality in the first place. 

“Family medicine and primary care is really the ability to manage patients and their families through their entire lifespan and the entire disease processes that come up,” he said. “It’s trying to keep them healthy and manage their health but it’s also helping them through the struggles of cancer, helping with that diagnosis and oftentimes involved with them at the end stage of that into hospice care as well. It really is a birth-to-grave specialty which is part of what makes it fascinating for me.

“When we were approached by the hospital about wanting us to bring in our model of care to their organization, we saw this as an opportunity to help make something better for the entire community. In the end, that’s what it all comes down to and what we’re here to do.”