The Tyler CVC culture of care

It’s a well-known fact that most doctors fresh out of their medical training don’t stay all that long at their first job. Given how much the American workforce job hops, it’s not all that surprising that doctors also bounce around from practice to practice as they look for the right mix of challenging work and compatible colleagues.

But when Dr. Raul Torres-Heisecke was contemplating a move from a position at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas to Tyler CVC a few years ago, something struck him about his soon-to-be colleagues. “Almost all of them were still in their first jobs after finishing their medical training,” he says. “That told me a lot. When someone gets out of school and they don’t leave their first job, especially in medicine, it’s a big deal. Usually, you will see about 80 or 90 percent of cardiologists only last a year in their first job.”

The reason the vast majority of doctors have spent their entire professional career at Tyler CVC comes down to the practice’s culture. “What really made me decide this was the right place for me was after I met the other doctors, it was clear just how committed they were to patient care,” says Torres-Heisecke. To be sure, culture can be a squishy term to define, and there certainly aren’t any medical practices that don’t claim to be committed above all to patient care.

Though plenty of grandiose terms can be thrown around to explain culture, at Tyler CVC it is defined by the everyday actions of the doctors, nurses and staff. “The culture here is you treat patients with respect,” says Dr. Robert Carney, a co-founder of Tyler CVC. “The culture is that we try to be attendant to the patient’s needs and we try to be attendant to the patient’s wants. Sometimes, there are complicated issues to explain about why we propose a course of treatment or medicine. We do that. We take the time it requires to do a good job.”

As vital as it is, culture at Tyler CVC means more than just making patient needs and wants the top priority. Culture also means cultivating an open environment that allows the varied expertise and experience of the practice’s doctors to come together to benefit patient care. “We all have different areas of expertise and we sit down and talk about patients,” says Torres-Heisecke. “If there is something that doesn’t sound or look right, we sit down and show it to someone else and make sure we get the right answer for the patient.”

It’s no coincidence that doctors at Tyler CVC treat patients with care and concern because that is exactly how they treat one another. “We have a special group of guys and we look out for each other and treat each other as family,” says Dr. Robert Smith, who has been with the practice since 2001. Smith knows this from experience. In 2010, his daughter was critically ill and had to spend two weeks in the intensive care unit. “The guys covered my practice and my call and never asked me once to pay their call back. This is a unique group.”