Paul Szmal: It's our Health Matters segment with our friends from University of Rochester Medicine, Finger Lakes Health. We'll start with Kim Alacqua, as always. Kim, good morning. How are you?
Guest: Good, Paul. How are you?
Paul Szmal: I am good. I am good. What do we got going on here?
Guest: I just have a couple of announcements. I want to give my plug again for MyChart. So if you have not signed up for MyChart yet for your patient portal, please go out and do that. As of November 1st, all of Finger Lakes Health will be on Epic. So you'll be able to access all of your information through MyChart. This will allow all of your information to be available to all your providers in real time to be able to see your results, see your messages, and collaborate together.
The other thing I want to mention is we're very, very excited to announce that we are bringing pediatrics back to the campus of Geneva General. We have Dr. Rice starting with us in July, and then we have Dr. Perry, who will be starting with us, I believe, in September, who are both pediatricians. So we're very excited to bring this service back locally to the Geneva community. And that will be in the medical office building on the second floor. Right now it will be in the same, it will be in Finger Lakes Health Primary Care, the same practice where Dr. Equinasi, Dr. Platser are practicing.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, we just had Dr. Equinasi on here recently. So that's great.
Guest: Yeah, we're very excited for all the growth, excuse me, all the growth and all the increased access to care that we're bringing to the community. So many providers, pediatrics, internal medicine, family medicine. We have a sports orthopedic, a female sports orthopedic surgeon starting with us in October, a rheumatologist coming in November. I could just go on and on. It's great, though, to have all those options available in one place.
Paul Szmal: Yes, we're very excited, and we know this is going to be a great benefit to our community. And speaking of options, we're going to talk about a couple of different options of care today, urgent care and occupational health. And who do we have as our guest, Kim?
Guest: Today we have a man who wears many, many hats. We have Bob Schweitzer, who is the Director of our Urgent Care, and he is the Director of our Occupational Health Services. And he also oversees the Student Health Center at Hobart William Smith, Hobbs Health Center, and at Cuca College, and at Northeast College. So Bob has been with us for about 15 years, and he runs all of these amazing programs. So Bob, what do you do in your spare time?
Bob Schweitzer: That's a good question. Exactly. It's a little busy right now, especially with our transformation into EPIC. So it's been a very exciting year.
Paul Szmal: So tell us about urgent care. I think people kind of know what it is, and will utilize it sometimes, but may not be sure exactly what to utilize it for.
Bob Schweitzer: Yeah. So urgent care is basically a department that offers services to patients who need to be seen more on an urgent basis, who may not be able to get into their primary care physician, or maybe don't really meet that criteria to go to the emergency room and bottleneck the ER. So we're open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in Geneva, and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Seneca Falls. And we offer services to patients coming in with upper respiratory infections. We see a lot of pediatrics. We do a lot of orthopedics and splinting, and we offer x-ray to see if anybody has a potential fracture. We just recently started offering rapid point-of-care testing for chlamydia and gonorrhea. So we offer also a lot of other point-of-care testing, PCR testing for COVID, Flu A, Flu B, strep. So we offer a lot of services that a lot of our competitors don't. So this is one of the reasons we've been voted Best Urgent Care in the Finger Lakes for eight years in a row.
Paul Szmal: Yeah. And the other things that are covered there include dental pain, minor wounds that might require stitches or sutures, minor cuts and burns, UTIs, even stuff like sore throats, earaches that may be a result of an ear infection, cough, that sort of stuff.
Bob Schweitzer: Yeah. All of these are services that we can provide in urgent care. And I mean, we can't predict when we're going to get sick, you know. And obviously, it's difficult sometimes to get into your primary care physician. So they have the option of calling our urgent care or scheduling an appointment online to come in and see us for any of those things that are listed. I have a very experienced staff of people that provide great services to the community. And we'll evaluate the patient to determine whether or not we can see them in urgent care, whether or not they may need a higher level of care and require the ER.
And the locations, by the way, the Geneva location is 789 Preemption Road. That's in the Finger Lakes Health Commons. Seneca Falls is 1991 Ballsy Road at Life Care Medical Associates. So those are the locations you can check out for urgent care.
Paul Szmal: We're talking with Bob Switzer from University of Rochester Medicine Finger Lakes Health. And Kim, we also have the Penyon location, right?
Guest: Yeah. I want to just give a plug for that, too. We also have Penyon Urgent Care, which is located in Soldiers and Sailors Health Center at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital.
Paul Szmal: Okay. So three different locations kind of covering three different geographic regions. Let's talk a little bit, Bob, about occupational health. Heard the term. Many people may not be familiar with exactly what that means.
Bob Schweitzer: Yeah. So occupational health is a department and services that we've provided in this area for almost 50 years. And what we do is we have a dedicated department located in Seneca Falls that provides services to companies. And we provide services to over 350 local companies, whether it be pre-employment physicals, DOT physicals, respirator clearance physicals. We have about 10 fire departments that we work with that we provide respirator clearance physicals and firefighter physicals for those folks. And basically our job is just to determine whether or not somebody is fit for duty, fit for work. And then talking about work safety. And in regards to DOT, we're making sure that they're safe to be on the roads, you know, driving these big, huge trucks and we're following Department of Transportation and federal guidelines to make sure that they're able to be certified to drive that type of vehicle.
Paul Szmal: And that's just one element of things, too, because I think when people think occupational health and they think of workplace stuff, they think of the obvious, which would be, you know, drug testing.
Bob Schweitzer: Yes. And we do offer drug testing. That's probably that and DOT physicals are probably the meat of what we do. We offer drug testing. We send the samples out to labs and we receive results within 24 hours. But that's not all. There are some other elements. There are some other different tests that can be provided for workplace and workplace employees.
Paul Szmal: Yeah. So in addition to the physical and drug testing, we also offer a lot of other diagnostic testing. We do fit tests, respirator fit tests. We do EKGs, chest x-rays. We do blood work. We do audiograms. All of those things that, depending on the company that you're working for, would determine whether or not you are fit for that job or if they're coming in for periodic exams to make sure that there's no occupational exposures that could be putting them in harm's way. And in some cases, some workplaces will offer some immunization clinics and that kind of falls under the purview here too.
Bob Schweitzer: We do. We've also been offering a lot of, you know, the thing of it is, is when one person's calls in sick, you know, and they're out with the flu, they could be out for days and that can impact a company significantly. So we offer flu vaccine clinics for a lot of companies. We also offer some companies, depending on what kind of exposures they are, will do hepatitis B vaccines. So there's a lot of different vaccines that we can offer. I think our flu campaign is probably one of our biggest ones that companies like because they want to keep their employees healthy, you know?
Paul Szmal: Absolutely. Time off is time lost. Right.
Bob Schweitzer: Right. How many companies do you work with right now? Do you have a kind of a round ball figure?
Paul Szmal: Yeah, we're over 350 right now.
Bob Schweitzer: Wow. Yeah. So we provide a lot of services and we're continuously growing. If there's a, if there's anybody listening that works for or runs a company that might be interested in talking to you about an occupational health program, how would they reach out?
Paul Szmal: Yeah, they can always reach out to us at our occupational health department. We're located in the Life Care building in Seneca Falls on 1991 Balsley Road, and they can reach out to us. Our number is 315-539-8058.
Bob Schweitzer: Okay. Fantastic. Bob, thank you so much.
Paul Szmal: Thank you for having me. Much appreciated. And Kim, I know you wanted to kind of put a ball in the conversation this morning.
Guest: Yeah, I just wanted to say, so as Bob mentioned, our Urgent Care has won the Reader's Choice Award for Best Urgent Care in the Finger Lakes for the last eight years. So voting is open again. So we would appreciate people to continue to support us and just recognize the high quality of urgent care that we provide locally. And again, those urgent care locations are Preemption Road in Geneva, Balsley Road in Seneca Falls, and the Soldiers and Sailors Medical Center in Paniagua.
Paul Szmal: Kim, as always, appreciate it.
Guest: Thank you. Great to see you, Paul.
