If Only Sickness Were Always this Posh

Crossing into Oconee County from Athens, there is a billboard just over the county line. “Hey mom, watch this!,” it reads and in the bottom corner advertises the convenient 24 hour varied-services of Athens Regional Medical Center, for those cute little emergencies that you sometimes can't plan for. The billboard screen then flips to reveal an add for high-end orthodontics. It's almost like the sign marks passage into a land where health-care is both abundant and convenient, where rich parents are paying heftily to keep their children healthy.

Just past the sign, there sits the prime jewel in the St. Mary’s Health Center crown. Perched along the edge of the Epps Bridge Parkway, 10 minutes away from St. Mary’s main campus in Athens, is the new and fairly posh St. Mary’s Outpatient, Rehab and Wellness Center at the exchange. Built in 2007, the facility is capped by a state of the art fitness center on the top floor that shines like a good health beacon through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows.

To me, this center is representative of a type of convenience medicine that is less likely to impact your routine and lifestyle. When people have options for their health care, convenience is the key to getting their attention, (and their insurance dollars, I'm assuming) said Marc Ralston, the PR Director for St. Mary’s. At the facility, patients can receive CT scans, MRI’s, mammography, bone density scans and a slate of outpatient services for whatever illness you might have. Ralston said that the center has cut down on traffic to the main hospital by allowing people to receive many of the more time-intensive and long term treatments without having to travel the ten miles to Athens.

My favorite part (and perhaps the most noticeably ostentatious) is the sleep clinic. Ralston said that it features 8 hotel quality beds with “luxurious private bathrooms” and 24 hour monitoring and counseling to help diagnose and treat sleep disorders. If my insurance paid for high-end hotel rooms, I could see myself quickly developing the most complex form of sleep-walking insomniac night-terrors witnessed by medical science.

Assuming there is nothing wrong with you that requires expensive treatments or sleep analysis, but you still crave some professional advice on how to get healthy, you can get a personalized wellness consultation from the fitness and wellness center doctors. They test your metabolism, put you through stress tests, eventually developing a highly specialized diet and workout regiment for the patients.

“I’m really starting to understand how uniquely my body functions,” said Mary Thompson of Watkinsville. “I now know the ways I need to specially care for myself to have the most productive life.”

When I asked Ralston about Oconee’s presence in other counties, he quickly pointed out that they provide home health care and hospice in each of the counties adjacent to Athens, but was also quick to admit that the Outpatient, Rehab and Wellness Center in Oconee County was the only building like it in the hospital system. What he did not say was that the money drew the hospital there, only saying that thanks to the facility, the hospital is more accessible to patients in Oconee and other counties. It has been noted by other DeepSouthHealth bloggers that there is a lack of hospitals and hospital funding in many of Georgia’s rural counties, but here in Oconee County, there is at the very least a place that patients can go to when they do not need long term or emergency care. And when they do get sick, at least patients can see a doctor in both comfort and style.