By Nathan Straus
nstraus@jacksonvilleprogress.com
Dr. Richard Viken joined the Trinity Mother Frances-Jacksonville staff last week to launch the hospital’s new full-time hospitalist program.
The program will ensure hospitalized patients consistently see the same doctor.
Viken said the program is an attempt to coordinate patient care and continuity for the patient.
“One patient sees one doctor” Viken said. “So many doctors now are overwhelmed and it’s hard to get into the hospital to help patients.”
When asked whether patients care for having a single consistent doctor, Viken said patients actually prefer it.
“Hospitalists are dedicated inpatient physicians devoted to efficiently managing the process of inpatient care from the time of admission to discharge from the hospital,” he said. “We do not take the place of their primary care physician, surgeon or specialist, but we work in close consultation with them to provide total case management during their entire stay.”
John Moore, a Trinity Mother Frances media relations agent, said the hospital had used the hospitalist in a smaller form for a few years, but Viken is the first full-time hospitalist for the Jacksonville location.
Viken said before his job with Trinity Mother Frances-Jacksonville, he was a teaching family doctor in Tyler.
“This is a new experience for me,” he said.
According to Viken, the idea of the hospitalist program is to have two full-time hospitalists alternating between busy weeks.
He said on average, he would expect a hospitalist to have work weeks far longer than 40 hours.
Moore said Trinity Mother Frances pioneered this area of health care years ago.
“It’s unique today, but it was very unique 12 years ago,” he said.
Viken said his job entails him constantly occupying the hospital grounds to see who he can attend to.
“I deal with acute care issues that involve immediate hospital care. The main purpose is to take care at the moment of crisis. The inpatients are my clinic,” he said.
He took the job because he wasn’t quite ready to retire yet, Viken said.
“This was the first position I thought of after leaving the University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler,” he said.
As a familiar face to hospitalized patients, Viken refers to himself as the conductor of the orchestra.
He said the patients appreciate not being passed off to doctor after doctor, and the staff also enjoys the consistency.
“A happy staff makes happy patients,” Viken said.
Moore said there’s been a recent explosion of specialties in medicine that makes the hospitalist program helpful.
“The more you have the more likely it is a patient will see several physicians. This program serves to make sense out of that and see that they get what they need,” Moore said.
Viken received his medical degree from the University of Oregon Medical School in Portland and completed his internship in family practice at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson. He is certified by the American Board of Family Medicine and is affiliated with the American Academy of Family Physicians, Texas Academy of Family Physicians, Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, Smith County Medical Society, American Association of the History of Medicine and the Texas Medical Association.
