Texas student and resident appointed to AAFP leadership posts
Two TAFP members have been appointed to positions within AAFP, Lindsay Botsford, M.D., and Christina Sheu.
TAFP resident member Lindsay Botsford, M.D., was appointed to the AAFP Commission on Governmental Advocacy. Botsford is in her second year at Baylor College of Medicine Kelsey-Seybold Family Medicine Residency Program in Houston. She began studying health policy as an undergraduate at Rice University where she majored in Policy Studies with a focus in Health Care Management and Policy. After that, Botsford was named a Truman Scholar and worked at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. Within TAFP, she has served on the Commission on Health Care Services and Managed Care and as Texas’ Alternate Delegate to the AAFP National Conference. Within TMA, she served on the TMA Board of Trustees and is currently on the TMA Council on Legislation.
TAFP member Christina Sheu, third-year medical student at the University of Texas Medical School, was appointed to serve as AAFP Regional Family Medicine Interest Group Coordinator. At UT Houston, she has served in many capacities with the Family Medicine Student Association including Membership Coordinator, Secretary and Treasurer. With her leadership, Sheu doubled the number of medical student members from UT Houston in 2008. As regional coordinator, she will work with other FMIG coordinators in the region to strengthen their programs. Sheu serves as secretary of the TAFP Section on Medical Students.
TAFP loses Austin physicians
Durward A. Baggett, M.D. | Dec. 30, 1924 - Aug. 21, 2008
TAFP Past President Durward A. Baggett, M.D., died on Aug. 21, 2008 at the age of 83. Baggett practiced family medicine in Austin for 43 years during which he served as chief of staff at Brackenridge Hospital. In addition to his post as TAFP president from 1981-1982, he was an active member of AAFP, the Travis County Medical Society, the Texas Medical Association and the American Medical Association. According to his obituary, he was the first physician in Travis County to become board certified.
Baggett served in the U.S. Navy during World War II before being transferred to the U.S. Marine Corps, 6th Fleet, to serve 18 months in the South Pacific as a medic and pharmacist. After his military service, he attended the University of Texas at Austin for chemistry and worked at Dow Chemical Company for years. He later went back to school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston where he was awarded his medical degree.
He is survived by his wife, Vadis Baggett; children, Mary Ann Kraemer and Durward David Baggett; grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Jerald R. “Doc” Senter, M.D. | March 25, 1924 - Oct. 31, 2008
TAFP life member Jerald R. “Doc” Senter, M.D., died on Oct. 31, 2008 at the age of 84. Senter practiced family medicine in Austin for 51 years, during which he delivered more than 2,500 babies. He was an active member of TAFP, AAFP, the Travis County Medical Society, the Texas Medical Association and the American Medical Association. He volunteered as the team physician for the Reagan High School football team in Austin for 28 years and was elected to the Austin Sports Hall of Fame.
Senter enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces and served as a combat officer with the 8th Air Force, 2nd Air Division, 458th Bomb Group, and 754th Bomb Squadron in England during World War II. After his honorable discharge, Senter attended the University of Tulsa for his Bachelor of Science degree. He received his medical degree from the University of Oklahoma.
Senter is survived by his wife, Joy; children, Jerry, Mike and Sandy; grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
San Angelo physician to be medical board president
Irvin E. Zeitler, Jr., D.O.
Gov. Rick Perry has appointed TAFP member Irvin E. Zeitler, Jr., D.O., of San Angelo president of the Texas Medical Board for a term to expire at Perry’s discretion, according to a press release from the governor’s office. Zeitler takes the place of Roberta Kalafut, D.O., of Abilene, who will now serve a three-year term on the TMB District Three Review Committee.
“I am pleased that Dr. Zeitler will be taking the reigns as president, and know that he shares my strong belief that Texas must have a strong and fair medical board,” Perry said in the release.
Zeitler, a board-certified family physician, is currently vice president of medical affairs at the Shannon Medical Center and a staff physician at the Shannon Senior Center. In addition to his membership in AAFP and TAFP, he is a member of the Texas Medical Association, Concho Valley Medical Society and the Texas Osteopathic Medical Association. Zeitler was awarded a master’s in health care management from the University of Texas at Dallas, and a doctorate of osteopathy from the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth. He completed his family medicine residency at Texas Tech University Health Science Center at Amarillo.
Corpus Christi physician known for heart health crusade dies at 81
Jose E. Antoni, M.D. | Dec. 12, 1926 - Sept. 22, 2008
TAFP life member Jose E. Antoni, M.D., died of cancer on Sept. 22, 2008 at the age of 81. “Dr. Tony,” longtime Corpus Christi family physician, is known for his “second life” after he survived a heart attack in March 1967. He spent the next 41 years training others how to save lives, especially how to operate the device that had saved his, a defibrillator, through an American Heart Association program called Advanced Cardiac Life Support.
Antoni worked in private practice in surgery and family medicine for 17 years before Everett Holt, M.D., who was organizing a family medicine residency program at CHRISTUS Spohn Hospital – Corpus Christi Memorial, convinced him to join academia. Antoni spent the next 14 years as the assistant director of the residency program before resigning in 1992 to spend more time with his family. In the following years, he continued to teach family medicine residents as a clinical professor.
“Dr. Antoni was of tremendous help in developing the residency program into one with an atmosphere of collegial learning,” Holt wrote in a letter to TAFP. “He was an excellent teacher—both at the bedside and in the lecture hall. By his example of treating and relating to patients, he molded the residents into family physicians of which we were proud.”
In addition to his membership in TAFP and AAFP, Antoni was an active member of the Gulf Coast Chapter of TAFP, served in many leadership roles within the Nueces County Medical Society, and helped establish the Nueces County Advanced Cardiac Life Support Training Center and the Nueces County Medical Education Foundation.
He was awarded a medical degree from Universidad de Santo Domingo Medical School in the Dominican Republic, completed a rotating internship at St. Joseph Hospital in Patterson, N.J., and completed one year of residency in surgery at Erlanger Hospital and three years of residency at Campbell Clinic in Chattanooga, Tenn.
Antoni is survived by his wife, Martha; children, Giselle, James and Michelle; and a grandchild.
TAFP survey shows challenge of implementing medical home model
While primary care physician organizations at the state and federal levels push the patient-centered medical home model as a solution to the nation’s health care crisis, the members of those organizations may need more information and support before they can transform their practices into medical homes. That is the conclusion drawn from a recent TAFP survey asking members their opinions on the medical home model.
AAFP, TAFP and many other health care reform groups have identified the medical home as a way to extend the efficiencies of primary care to the entire health care delivery system. The argument is gaining momentum among policy makers and large employers, but many rank-and-file physicians question the viability of the model.
“Doctors need more information about the medical home, about exactly what they have to do to make their practices qualify and how such a change will affect their bottom line,” says Kathy McCarthy, TAFP Chief Operating Officer and Director of Member Services.
More than half of the survey respondents reported that they are somewhat familiar with AAFP’s patient-centered medical home initiative, with 20 percent indicating they were not familiar and 21 percent reporting they were very familiar. Two-thirds said they were interested in becoming a qualified medical home but 74 percent were not familiar with the National Committee on Quality Assurance medical home certification program, which has emerged as the standard certification for medical home pilot projects across the country.
At the close of its two-year demonstration project, TransforMED, AAFP developed the Medical Home IQ Assessment, an online tool designed to show physicians how their practices stack up against the standard medical home model. In TAFP’s survey, 68 percent of respondents said they were not familiar with the tool.
Respondents overwhelmingly listed financial barriers as the chief obstacle to implementing the medical home model.
“We received a flood of comments in the survey, representing a wide range of opinions about the viability of the medical home,” McCarthy says. “There is a lot of skepticism about whether physicians will be able to afford to make the transformation and whether payers will actually pay for the additional services.”
Tom Banning, TAFP CEO, says, “For the patient-centered medical home to be successful, we have to not only persuade government officials, employers and health insurers, but we have to make sure our members have the information and the tools they need.”
TAFP member warns of “Seductive Delusions”
You’ve probably seen it happen countless times in your practice. Confident, intelligent teens and young adults exhibit shocked disbelief upon learning that the burning sensation they described actually isn’t a urinary tract infection. After all, sexually transmitted diseases only happen to other, more promiscuous people, right?
Austin family physician Jill Grimes, M.D., calls this belief a “seductive delusion,” and after having the conversations time and again in her practice, she decided to do something about it. In her new book, “Seductive Delusions: How Everyday People Catch STDs,” Grimes uses fictional stories based on her practice experience to not only provide information on 10 of the most common STDs, but also to illustrate the fact that anyone can contract them.
“I didn’t start out wanting to write a book,” she says, but high school students, college students and other young adults from all walks of life kept showing up in her exam room with STDs. She says the most prevalent in her practice was genital herpes acquired during oral sex, the news of which would leave patients “just sobbing hysterically, saying ‘but I didn’t even have sex. How can I have this?’ I just felt like clearly I’m failing and somehow we’re not getting the message across.”
She noticed that patients would often come in with specific and detailed questions spurred by episodes of “ER” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” so she began to write stories about the kinds of patients she treated. “People like it because it’s stories,” she says. “People remember stories; they don’t remember statistics.”
For each STD except the chapter on cervical cancer, Grimes tells the stories of a male character and a female character, then follows with an informative list of quick facts and frequently asked questions about the disease. With familiar yet interesting characters and quick, witty dialogue, the stories read like TV scripts. It’s easy to become rapt in the tales. Grimes says she puts copies of the book in her exam rooms and often catches patients pouring over them when she enters the room.
She hopes the book will become a tool for her fellow family physicians to communicate the risks and dangers associated with such a taboo topic as STDs. “As a physician first and foremost, the whole marketing portion is a little awkward, but I want physicians to know about it. My partners love it.”
A board-certified family physician, Grimes is in private practice at West Lake Family Practice, works intermittently at the University of Texas Health Services in Austin and is an associate editor for the “5-Minute Consult” textbook.