Physicians & Medical Resource Guide 2024-2025 by Palm Beach Media Group

Julie Bailey, DMD

Hunter Brantley, DMD, MS

William A. Tyre, DMD Brian R. Beck, DMD, MS

Pickleball

Continuum of Care

Music as Therapy

Imparting a

“Without question, one of the biggest benefits is it allows people to get exercise,” Mongerie said. “For people who may not have chosen another sport or maybe found another sport too difficult, it allows them to maximize their ability to enjoy a sport, at the same time getting the benefits of moving around and being social.”

Mongerie said Tallahassee’s USA Pickleball Association ambassador, Carolyn Allaire, has been instrumental in popularizing the sport and introducing it to longtime tennis players.

Mongerie, himself, caught the bug, finding that he enjoyed pickleball’s social aspects.

“Very few people play singles in pickleball; the majority of the game is doubles,” he said. “The socializing is a lot more in the sport than in tennis right now.

“I could go out there and play with you, and we’ll have a fun time. You might not win, but we’ll have fun,” he joked.

For sure, Mongerie would be formidable. He played tennis at Florida A&M and is a United States Professional Tennis Association elite player who has worked as a tennis instructor for 17 years and is now a certified pickleball instructor.

The city recognized pickleball’s growing popularity and adapted tennis courts for use as pickleball courts. Mongerie began overseeing pickleball along with tennis and hosted lessons, clinics and roundrobin tournaments.

Now, the city has 47 courts across Tallahassee’s parks and community centers.

Tom Brown Park stands to be the most popular, with four permanent pickleball courts available and regular open play sessions where anyone can come to learn, play and socialize with other pickleballers.

Tom Brown also hosts leagues on Tuesdays and Thursdays for beginners, advanced beginners and intermediate advanced players.

City of Tallahassee racquet sports operations manager Lenin Mongerie is an accomplished tennis player who played at FAMU. He took up pickleball in part due to the social aspects of the game. Doubles play is predominant in pickleball, which has grown 40% since 2018, especially among older adults.

The new Four Oaks Park at Tram Road and Four Oaks Boulevard has six permanent courts and is now offering court reservations and open play. Winthrop, Jack L. McLean, Lafayette, Jake Gaither and Walker-Ford parks and the LeVerne Payne and Walker Ford community centers have outdoor tennis/pickleball courts. And a number of indoor courts can be found at other community and senior centers.

“There are a lot of grassroots programs that have sprung up

that are really all about growing the sport in Tallahassee,” Mongerie said.

Local groups like the Tallahassee Pickleball Association promote the sport through fundraising, volunteering and advocating for court improvements.

Mongerie anticipates that Tallahassee will host national pickleball tournaments.

“I think pickleball is going to be growing and continue to grow,” he said.

CALL A FRIEND, GRAB A COURT AND PLAY!

A Tom Brown Park

443-557 Easterwood Drive

4 courts (reserve or first-come)

B Winthrop 1601 Mitchell Ave. 6 courts (reserve or first-come)

C Lafayette 501 Ingleside Drive 3 indoor and 3 outdoor courts (business hours only)

D LeVerne Payne 450 W. 4th Ave 2 courts (bring own balls and paddles)

E Jack L. McLean Jr. 700 Paul Russell Road 3 indoor and 2 outdoor courts (bring own balls and paddles)

F Walker–Ford 2301 Pasco St. 3 indoor and 3 outdoor courts (nighttime play available)

G Jack Gaither 801 Bragg Drive 2 courts, can reserve

H Sue Herndon McCollum 501 Ingleside Ave. 3 courts (indoor only)

I Lawrence–Gregory 1115 Dade St. 3 courts (indoor only)

J Tallahassee Senior Center 1400 N. Monroe St. 2 courts (indoor only)

K Four Oaks Park 51 Four Oaks Blvd. 6 courts (reserve or first-come)

U.S. health care spending grew 2.7% in 2021, reaching $4.3 trillion or $12,914 per person. As a share of the nation’s gross domestic product, health spending accounted for 18.3%, according to the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). As recently as 1980, that figure stood at 8.9%.

Continuum of Care

Leaders seek a seamless approach to health care

BY STEVE BORNHOFT

a number of other services in order to build scale. In the value-based world, as opposed to the fee-for-services world that we currently inhabit, payers are going to align themselves with organizations that are capable of achieving cost savings or sharing costs.”

For Wertman, payers equate almost exclusively to Medicare and Medicaid. The two entitlement programs supply BBH with 97% of its revenue. Increasingly, he said, they will be looking for health care service providers that “have scale, cover a lot of territory, and are partnered with other nonprofits in relationships adding up to a continuum of care.”

That concept is illustrated, at least in microcosm, by the newly opened First Commerce Center for Compassionate Care, a hospice unit operated by BBH and located at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. Its development was preceded by years of discussion among O’Bryant, Wertman and their respective board chairs, a dialogue that has now expanded in scope to include other possible relationships.

“Talking about hospice services opened the door to other conversations about what we can do in our community to improve care,” O’Bryant said. “All of us on the TMH and BBH teams are willing to look at what that might mean. We went from the inpatient hospice unit consideration to looking at the bigger picture.

“Bill brought some great strategists into his organization, and long story short, we found that there are synergies that we have the potential to capitalize on. But we might never have landed on them, had we not had an established relationship.”

Such interconnectedness characterizes Tallahassee, a community that O’Bryant thinks of as a “cosmopolitan Mayberry.” The city, he said, provides a great laboratory for developing, testing and refining new approaches to delivering health care.

COVID-19, too, advanced the dialogue in its way. A pandemic can serve as a mother of invention.

“We looked at emerging technologies and our experience during COVID, when we learned to do a lot more with remote monitoring and more telemedicine services,” O’Bryant said. “We in health care are not taking full advantage of that. So, the question comes to be how we could better use technology to enable people to receive certain levels of service at lower costs and at home, a place that they are comfortable and familiar with.”

Wertman and O’Bryant recognized that BBH and TMH have differing core competencies, and that there are health care services and activities that neither is engaged in. That realization led to their focus on a continuum whereby health care, from womb to tomb, might be made seamless, accessible, affordable and community-based.

“At the hospital, we take care of very sick, highly acute patients, everything from trauma to strokes to heart attacks,” O’Bryant said. “Those are always, to a degree, going to take precedence over other areas. But I can see 20% to 30% of the cases we have in the hospital today being treated at home, if we can monitor patients properly. If you can use technology to create an observation platform in the home and give people access to resources on a timely basis, then you could see a big chunk of what we do here move to a different, lower-cost environment.”

In the future, O’Bryant envisions, TMH will function as a big intensive and intermediate care unit by providing high levels of care while relying on a partner to address transitional and rehabilitative care.

Supplying those less acute types of care should not be a secondary project for TMH, O’Bryant said. Instead, it needs the primary role of an entity committed to making it its top priority.

“If you can use technology to create an observation platform in the home and give people access to resources on a timely basis, then you could see a big chunk of what we do here move to a different, lower-cost environment.”

— Mark O’Bryant, the president and CEO at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare Inc.

Accordingly, Wertman has created a new nonprofit, Seven Oaks, which is focused as O’Bryant suggests. It is governed by a board made up of the same people that comprise the BBH board. In addition, a TMH board member will sit on the BBH and Seven Oaks boards and vice versa.

“Seven Oaks is going to take this new transitional care model, and they are going to be the drivers of the transitional care strategy,” O’Bryant said.

Wertman and O’Bryant are confident that a reliable continuum of care delivered by community-based nonprofits will make for a healthier Tallahassee and Northwest Florida.

TMH and BBH have a shared vision and cultures that align, Wertman said.

“TMH has a number of organizations that they work with, and so do we,” he added. “By coming together, we can coalesce in an even stronger network that will reach

LEFT: CEOs Bill Wertman of Big Bend Hospice and Mark O’Bryant of Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare were photographed at the First Commerce Center for Compassionate Care, a hospice unit operated by Big Bend Hospice and located at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. The project, they say, exemplified what cooperating nonprofits can do to deliver affordable, accessible health care to patients of all ages.

BELOW: Parents participate in an online medical consultation from the comforts of their home. Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare president and CEO Mark O’Bryant envisions that 20% to 30% of today’s in-hospital cases will one day be treated at home, given the ability to properly monitor patients remotely.

people in outlying communities and in rural areas. We will be working on a more robust model for health care delivery that will include homehealth and palliative care in addition to creating more opportunities for 24/7 health care.”

TMH has involved Dr. Jing Wang, dean of the FSU College of Nursing, in its research into extending care to populations including underserved groups. In 2023, she and two other researchers combined to write an article about how artificial intelligence can be incorporated in homes and hospitals through various digital health platforms, embedded with sensors, wearables and remote monitoring devices.

Technology is sure to play an expanding role in efforts to take health care to the house.

Notions of house and home are central to O’Bryant’s outlook.

“Tallahassee is my home, and if I’m going to be a patient in

Tallahassee, I don't want to have someone a thousand miles away making decisions about the kind of health care we are going to have in our community,” he said. “We have board members from our community, we have doctors who live here and aren’t just rotating in and out. Health care is better when driven locally. Our accounts aren’t stripped nightly. We are able to retain and reinvest our resources locally.”

O’Bryant often thinks about a comment made by John Hogan, who retired last year after more than four decades as the chief executive at Capital Health Plan in Tallahassee.

Paraphrasing Hogan, O’Bryant said, “You better make communitybased health care good because you’re gonna see everyone in town at the Walmart, at Publix, at church or somewhere. And you have to answer to them. You can’t hide from them in cosmopolitan Mayberry. We live here. And that’s a good thing.”

Music as Therapy

Therapists utilize a range of instruments and music to enhance patients’ well-being

BY EMMA WITMER

Elvis Presley took the stage at Chicago’s International Amphitheater on March 29, 1957, in a gold lamé suit and proceeded to cause 13 girls to faint. One even fainted twice.

Elvis catalyzed a ravenous fanbase, but there may be more to this story than star power. Music, as it turns out, has power all on its own.

The dedicated team of certified music therapists at Tallahassee

Memorial HealthCare (TMH) leverages the psychological and neurological impacts of music to address a wide variety of issues in patients of all ages, from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to geriatric care.

Valerie Williams, the director of TMH’s music therapy department, leads a team of four full-time, certified music therapists, five parttimers and two interns who use

guitars, ukuleles, piano and other percussion instruments and recorded music to reach clients in ways that only music can.

“In the simplest definition, music therapy is using music to accomplish nonmusical goals,” Williams said.

Anyone can engage with music on a physical level by swaying to a tune or tapping toes to a beat. These movements make people feel more present and alive. There

OPPOSITE: Music therapist Brittany Rosado leads a Little One’s Music Play class, an early childhood development group representing a partnership between Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare and Florida State University. The project received support from the National Institute for Infant and Child Medical Music Therapy.

RIGHT: Above: NICU music therapist Hannah Sellers helped a mother on the Antenatal Care Unit write a song thanking the medical staff on the unit for the care she received at TMH.

are, however, distinct differences between enjoying music and music therapy. Certified music therapists hold a four-year degree in music therapy or a master’s degree equivalent and complete a 1,200-hour internship. They must also pass the CBMT Board Certification exam to work in a therapeutic setting.

“As board-certified professionals, we have a lot of training beyond just music,” Williams said. “We are trained in counseling techniques, psychology, neurobiology, basic anatomy skills. We look at how the brain works and why the music is working, not just the knowledge that music works.”

Williams and her team develop individual treatment plans, employ flexible intervention options and continually analyze data to measure progress. As part of the TMH ecosystem, Williams and her team operate in every unit in the main hospital as well as outpatient care centers and parent-child groups. Some specialize in particular populations.

Hannah Sellers works in the NICU, using simple lullabies to introduce new stimuli to infants who are otherwise isolated due to their premature birth.

“One of the protocols that we use is the PAL, which is the pacifieractivated lullaby,” Sellers said. “That uses contingent music based on their sucking. So, they suck for 10 seconds and developmentally appropriate music plays. Then we can adjust those settings, making it harder for the music to trigger, so either they

have to suck more times or stronger to get that music to play.”

The PAL was invented by FSU’s Dr. Jayne Standley and is now used to teach sucking to infants across the country.

Sellers is especially cautious when working with premature infants. Music therapy offers many benefits, but done carelessly, music can have counterproductive effects.

“Infants in the NICU can’t listen to the same music that we listen to because they’re premature, and their

brain literally will stop developing properly,” Sellers said.

These risks are also present in adolescent and adult patients.

“The one that always gets me is blood pressure,” added Michaela Schenkel, another music therapist with TMH. “People get excited when they hear music they like, but you could be working with a patient who’s on five different medications for their blood pressure. Then the nurse comes in because the excitement is raising their blood pressure and heart

MEDICAL LISTINGS

Note: These listings are not comprehensive and do not include every doctor or specialty clinic available in Tallahassee.