After being in private practice in Eureka, California, for three years, we eventually moved back home to San Diego. I have been a member of the medical society since 1998. Eventually I joined the board, and realized how little I knew about organized medicine in San Diego. On a state level, I also became a CMA delegate to the large group forum through my affiliation with SCMG. I was eventually elected to the board of trustees. This past year I was elected as vice-chair of the board. I’m in private practice as a gastroenterologist with San Diego Digestive Disease Consultants. We are seven partners with three offices in San Diego, Poway, and Coronado. I was elected to the board of Sharp Community Medical Group in 1999 and the executive committee in 2002, eventually becoming vice president. I got the opportunity to serve on the Sharp Healthcare board of directors as the SCMG representative between 2005 and 2012, and continue to serve on its finance committee. Completing a leadership academy there was very beneficial as well. I’m so lucky to have such a wonderful family. My beautiful wife, Christina, and I started dating in high school and we have been happily married for 35 years. She has been very supportive of me and my career, both emotionally and financially as we were married after my first year at UCSF. She has put up with the long hours during medical school and training, and is now dealing with long hours with multiple meetings from the various boards I belong to. We have three wonderful children. Alexandria attended the University of Arizona, then received her master’s in teaching. She has been teaching first grade in the classroom since August. It can be done and we need to get the kids back in school. Our son, Sergio, went to UCLA. He graduated medical school from UCSF last year and is currently an orthopedic surgery resident there.
Our daughter Erica went to the University of Oregon and is a public relations specialist. She got her dream job only to be let go during the pandemic. Eventually rehired, she has been working long hours from home. I’m sure she will one day own the company. Luckily all three of our kids are foodies and we promised them that if they graduated from college, we would take them to eat at the French Laundry, which we did. Like some of us here, I’m sure even they would also go back there during a pandemic. This past year has been difficult for all of us. Do we furlough our staff? Do we take out loans? We decided to keep all of our employees. Even as physicians we didn’t know the full extent of the severity of this new virus. Many of us had great concern of all the death and suffering we were seeing. We were certainly concerned for our patients, families, friends, and colleagues. We changed our practices and adapted to telemedicine, something most of us had no intention of ever doing. Being in the hospital and clinics, we wondered if we would get ill and bring it home to our families. Getting PPE from CMA and SDCMS really helped our practices. Eventually getting our vaccinations in December and then volunteering to give them made us feel like we were contributing to ending the pandemic. I volunteered many Saturdays with Dr. Asha Devereaux as well as many shifts with Sharp Healthcare, and remember being asked, “Why are you doing that?” I just said, “Because we have to.” A small dent in Sharp’s 600,000 vaccinations given to date, but we have to shift from
vaccinating at supersites to giving vaccines in our offices, where our patients can discuss their concerns with their trusted physician. We look forward to returning to a normal life, and practice. I’m sure telemedicine is here to stay in one form or another, depending on payment reforms. Our patients, however, also look forward to coming back to our offices. A few points: We need more physicians involved in organized medicine to have a seat at the table to direct our own future, or it will be directed for us. We must defend MICRA and defeat the November 2022 initiative or it will destroy malpractice as we know it. I would love to see more diversity in our medical schools and the physician workforce that resembles our population. We need to encourage more students to go into medicine, perhaps setting up booths at career days at local schools, colleges, and universities. That is how I went from wishing I could be a doctor to being guided in the right path and accomplishing my goal. I would also encourage you to support the medical society’s own Champions for Health Project Access by volunteering your medical services for those in greatest need. I ask this not only from the physicians, but also from all healthcare facilities to perhaps allow your physicians to do one case per month to start. I look forward to serving as your president and promise to do my best to represent all of our members’ concerns. If I do half of what Holly did, I would be proud. Thank you.
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