by Paula Span
Mary Wareheim suffers from a long list of health problems. She’s an amputee who uses a wheelchair. She has diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and an irregular heartbeat; she takes 11 prescription drugs. At 83, she leaves home infrequently, perhaps twice a year.
Yet she’s been the hospital just once in six years, probably because she’s had excellent medical care and monitoring. Though she’s essentially homebound, doctors come to her, in the Baltimore house she shares with her daughter, son-in-law and a Great Dane named Murphy, through the Johns Hopkins Elder House Call Program.
“My mother would absolutely make excuses not to go to a doctor,” said her daughter Chris Ricko, 49. “Now she doesn’t have an excuse.”
House calls aren’t a new idea, of course. Johns Hopkins has been sending attending physicians and residents out to see frail, elderly patients in their homes for 30 years. (I remember our family doctor coming to see me, black bag in hand, when I had the measles in my long-ago youth, so I wouldn’t infect everyone in his waiting room.)
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