October 2000 • Post-Assembly Edition • Dallas
Family Physician of the Year puts focus on underserved
Dennis Saver, M.D. was honored as AAFP's 2001 Family Physician of the Year by the Congress of Delegates.
The Academy's 2001 Family Physician of the Year has achieved national recognition for his community's efforts to care for the underserved, but his concern for that population was triggered before he even entered medical school.
Dennis Saver, M.D., had planned to pursue a career as a clinical researcher "with a capital R and a small C." While working as a health data analyst with an urban Philadelphia clinic, however, he saw the need for continuity of care in the community context.
"It showed me that there was a real need for taking care of people, and taking care of them in a larger sense than just treating them as numbers or encounter units," he said.
Upon completing a family practice residency in Gainesville, Fla., Saver took a National Health Service Corps assignment with a Rural Health Initiative in the rural Appalachian town of Newburg, W. Va.
At the end of his two-year obligation, he opted to stick around another eight years.
Saver took his family and his concern for underserved people back to Florida in 1990, where he subsequently became founding president of his current group practice, Primary Care of the Treasure Coast, in Vero Beach. In 1991, he volunteered to chair the county medical society's new indigent care task force, which developed a volunteer physician clinic using the Florida Medical Association "We Care" model. The program answered the county's plea for subspecialists to care for patients with Medicaid or no insurance. Although patients could receive primary care at the health department, subspecialty care had been difficult to obtain from private physicians, Saver said.
In the Indian River County We Care program, primary care physicians evaluate patients and then refer them to subspecialists when needed. Most of the subspecialists now treat the We Care patients in their private offices, volunteering on a rotating basis.
Saver chairs the county We Care committee and volunteers in the program. "It's usually a great thing for me to go in and be a doctor and do medicine and not worry about the business aspects," he said. "When I'm volunteering, I know I'm not getting paid, and I don't have to worry about paying someone's salary or the light bill or the workman's comp or whether the patient can afford this or that. I can really just carry my stethoscope, do clinical medicine and walk away knowing that had I not done it, it wouldn't have happened. The second aspect is that our program has gotten some publicity nationally, and I'm hopeful that it may spark other people to contribute in a similar fashion in their own communities."
As he continues to reach out to the community's needy people, Saver is now targeting the bureaucracy of Florida's Medicaid system. Reforms would enable more physicians to participate and, in turn, would give more people access to high-quality health care, he said. "Right now, you have to be really, really dedicated to participate in Medicaid. You have to jump over enormous hurdles, suffer incredible bureaucracy and tons of paperwork, and your reward is that you get paid less than your overhead costs, if you get paid at all."
The AAFP Congress of Delegates presented Saver with the 2001 Family Physician of the Year Award on Sept. 18.
Referring to his work at We Care, Saver told the Congress, "To my surprise, this activity for which I sought no personal gain has brought me an extraordinary honor." The clinic's patients and staff wrote letters nominating him as Florida Family Physician of the Year, which eventually led to his receipt of AAFP's 2001 Family Physician of the Year Award.
FP Report is published by the AAFP News Department.
Copyright © 2000 by American Academy of Family Physicians.
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