Serving the Whole Client

Success in the home medical equipment business can be defined in different ways. Some point to positive patient outcomes, others to big bottom lines. Mid Georgia Respiratory (MGR) Homecare in Griffin, Ga., aims for both.

Jack Clark, RRT, CRT, RCP, founder and principal of the 26-year old company, stays focused on his mission: caring for patients and meeting referral sources' needs.

“I seek to offer health and wellness to my patients, and by that, they will have some prosperity because they will spend less on their illness, their pharmacy bills or their physician visits,” he explains. “So, I'm a caregiver. I'm a respiratory therapist, and I practice taking care of patients with needs — I am not just an equipment purveyor.”

Clark has enjoyed a long interest in total health and wellness. As a younger clinician, he got so busy with critical care patients and 24/7 on-call status working in the respiratory disease unit, and later the neonatal intensive care unit, at a medical center that he “burned out,” he says. Not only was he exhausted, but he developed heart disease at the age of 39. After an angioplasty, as part of his recovery Clark found that when he avoided certain foods, walked, used active relaxation techniques and worked less — which allowed him to get adequate rest and reduce stress — his heart disease reversed.

As a result, today Clark coaches patients on seeking health and wellness along with management of their disease and medical equipment.

“I coach them on various things about wellness, and I place a lot of emphasis on food and nutrition because people do not understand their needs in those areas,” he says. “None of us in traditional medicine was taught much about keeping folks well; our job was to save their lives.”

Education Is Key

Clark founded MGR Homecare in 1979. Today, the company continues to operate with one location and 14 employees, serving customers in Georgia, east Alabama and north Florida. With a client roster comprised mostly of Medicare patients, the company concentrates on respiratory care, with about 20 percent of its business in other HME products.

On the day of his interview for this article, Clark had just returned from seeing a ventilator-dependent patient. He spent more than two hours at her home changing her tracheotomy tube.