Devin Bustin, M.D. For Devin Bustin, who completed undergraduate studies (psychology) and attended medical school at the University of Florida, Tallahassee always had been enemy territory. So it was that Bustin, when he learned that Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare had an opening for an emergency room physician, decided to interview for the job “just for the experience.” That experience, however, would sell him on TMH. Bustin had completed his residency at the Carolina Medical Center, one of the top-five busiest trauma centers in the country and home to doctors who “wrote the books on emergency medicine.” “I could have gone anywhere,” Bustin said. He began to consider TMH seriously when he found himself interviewing not just with a doctor or two, but with the hospital’s CEO and chief medical officer. He was impressed by their pledge to stay out of physicians’ way and let them “do the right thing.” And he was excited by their willingness to help him establish at the hospital an ultrasonography program — “basically, it’s using an ultrasound machine at bedside to rapidly obtain information to guide your case management.” Bustin recognizes about TMH that “we’re not a big academic center, so we’re not going to be as cutting edge as Shands (in Gainesville) might be, but that’s OK. “What cutting edge facilities do best is cutting-edge stuff. A doctor treats you for a condition that he discovered and named. We do the bread-and-butter stuff and more very well, and meanwhile we’re very close to the cutting edge. When we have that rare bone tumor, we’ll transfer you to Shands, but otherwise, we’re all you could ask for in a community hospital.”
PHOTO COURTESY TMH/KIRA DERRYBERRY PHOTOGRAPHY (BUSTIN) AND TMH/DAVE BARFIELD
Matthew Lawson, M.D. Dr. Matthew Lawson displayed a device that essentially resembles a miniaturized plumber’s snake. Called a microcatheter, it is actually a delivery device that is inserted in the femoral artery in a thigh and run up into the brain. Upon arrival there, it is used to place tiny platinum coils in unruptured aneurisms. Several coils may be delivered, forming concentric circles that cause an aneurism to clot off. The procedure, developed in the 1990s, has through recent years mostly replaced the earlier practice of entering the brain through the skull and clipping aneurisms. Repeated studies have established that coiling consistently produces better outcomes than clipping. Coiling was introduced to Tallahassee in 2012 thanks largely due to the efforts of Lawson, an endovascular neurosurgeon. Practicing in Gainesville, where he had attended medical school and completed his residency and fellowship, Lawson, now 39, found
that many of his candidates for coiling were North Florida residents. On that basis, he perceived the need for his subspecialty in Tallahassee and began discussions with the neurological clinic here and with Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare. “I met with (TMH CEO) Mark O’Bryant and he assured me that the hospital was interested in building a room for endovascular work,” Lawson said. “So, the hospital wanted to do it and the clinic wanted to do it and, while I didn’t have anything in writing and we’re talking about a $3 million project, I committed to moving here and Mr. O’Bryant lived up to his word.” Lawson regards Tallahassee as a big little town when it comes to medicine. “New techniques and new producers come along and most community hospitals are slow adopters, but that’s not true at TMH,” Lawson said. “We recently became licensed as the only comprehensive stroke center in the region. We’re incredibly busy and we’re doing good things for people from Pensacola to Dothan to half of the way to Jacksonville.”
Adam Oliver, M.D. As a student of history, Dr. Adam Oliver — at this writing, he is reading a large tome on the lives and times of the Apalachee Indians — may have been especially susceptible to a parallel offered him by a neurologist he met while attending the medical school at Louisiana State University. For Oliver, 37, who grew up as the son of a physician, the language of doctoring has been part of his vernacular since childhood. Medicine always has been approachable; he never considered that it was something he could not do and, for a long while, he assumed he would be a family-practice doctor, just like dad. (Whit Oliver practiced in Blountstown when Adam was in elementary school and continues to practice in Tallahassee.) Oliver, however, was to become fascinated with neuroscience when he observed at LSU a Parkinson’s patient undergoing deep brain stimulation, a procedure that had the effect of restoring the patient’s ability to speak. “I saw that and I said, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” Oliver recalls. But the prospect of neurosurgery was intimidating. He was warned that the specialty is so consuming that “you won’t see your family, you will wind up divorced, you won’t have a life.” Dr. Jose Bermudez, who Oliver counts as a chief mentor along with his father, would cure the student’s reluctance with a story about Cortez. “Cortez’s troops were so diseased and sick and afraid of the Indians that they were going to mutiny,” Oliver began to repeat Bermudez’s story. “He was on the beaches at Vera Cruz and they were going to start their march to Mexico City and there were some Indians who were willing to help them. But the troops were afraid they were going to die there and wanted to return to Spain. So Cortez got up in the middle of the night and he burned his own ships. “If you want to become a neurosurgeon, burn your ships.” That, Oliver said, is some of the best advice he ever received. “Faced with adversity, you don’t dig trenches that you can fall back into,” he said. 2017 T A L L A H A S S E E B U S I N E S S J O U R N A L / 55