His Passion for Preventive Care Transforms his Patients' Lives
Using just his waiting room, Gary Bullock, DO, MPH, helps patients transform their lives, while replenishing some of the fulfillment that managed care had drained from his practice.
"To do primary and preventative care today is in a lot of ways frustrating and unrewarding," says Bullock who practices at Hoover Family Healthcare as part of the Baptist Healthcare System. "Managed care forces us to spend less time with patients in counseling, because the more time we spend with a patient the less we get paid. Nurse anesthetists get paid more than we do."
Bullock's frustration was compounded by his earlier education in public health. With a Masters in public health from UAB, he witnessed the positive impact that preventative medicine has on individuals. But within the current healthcare system, he had to watch obesity and diabetes on the rise with no ability to enable the one-on-one time needed to make long-term change.
So this year, Bullock got creative. "I wanted to give the opportunity to patients who were motivated to talk about behavioral modification, nutrition, and how to implement that in a real way." That required counseling, which required time.
That's where the waiting room came in. Bullock posted flyers in his patient rooms promoting a weekly preventative health clinic in his waiting room on Saturday mornings. "I decided that if I got paid, fine. If not, I'd at least get some time with motivated patients to do what we need to be doing," he says.
The flyers said nothing about weight loss or any specific disease. Instead, they emphasized how to live healthier and reduce the need for medications through exercise and diet.
At the first session in January, three patients arrived. Since then, the group size averages ten and tops out at fifteen. And though the sessions were meant to last 45 minutes, they generally run 90.
Each meeting begins with an educational component devised by Bullock. "And then I let them talk about the challenge of daily exercise and nutrition, what's brought success or triggered them to struggle, and we track their progress over time," he says.
In these first six months, the weight loss averages between ten and twenty pounds per patient. "But that's not the success," Bullock says. "The success is internal. We eat how we feel, and we're trying to dig into the lifelong reasons why they sabotage success in their lives. That's not something we can do in the seven and half minutes I get during the week."
One woman drives from Cullman almost every week. "She was 340 pounds, and she's lost over 30 pounds," Bullock says. "That's more than I ever expected. I'm pretty impressed with her.
"But we're not going for anything on Oprah, as far as anything dramatic. And we're not going for the quick fix," he says. "We're looking for the overnight success after years of hard work."
Bullock says he's lost no money with the venture, either. "The payments been better than I thought," he says. "We average three to four payments for office visits for that hour, and that's typically what I do during the week." Insurance covers the visits for hypertension and other chronic conditions where lifestyle modification impacts treatment.
"I don't get paid for the additional preparation time and effort," Bullock says. "But I do that for the satisfaction of fulfilling the Hippocratic Oath. I get to do some real preventative care."
Bullock also gets fulfillment from helping couples adopt. As a parent of three biological children and two siblings from
"I graduated from Samford, and almost all the people I know from there have adopted," he says, including someone who runs an international adoption agency. He and his wife, Michele, have "always been amazed at the idea of adoption. I just never thought I'd be part of it."
But when he bought a classic Corvette off e-bay in 2006, "my wife said, 'If you can afford that car, we can afford to adopt.' And there was no answer to that," he says with a laugh. So they adopted Manny from a Guatemalan orphanage. Manny was six months old at the time.
About a year later, the orphanage called to say they had Manny's sister. The Bullocks had five days to decide. Now Ella has also become part of the family. "Adoption gives you a reflection that you don't find in a church or a temple. I can't explain it," Bullock says. "We had to give up a lot. I had to give up that Corvette," he interjects with a laugh. "But there's something otherworldly about adoption.
"I'll be shopping with Manny and see someone do a double-take. I forget we don't look alike," he says. "But biology means so little when it comes to loving another person. I never expected that to happen."
