Village Profile® Home Page | About our Company | Sales Opportunities | Community eStore | vpmobile.us®

Healthcare

Alpine Family Physicians has been a familiar part of the family medicine options in Lake Zurich since 1984, when founding doctors John Kolb and Robert Trauscht took over the practice of a retiring physician. From that humble beginning, Alpine has evolved into a 10-doctor operation, now with a second location in Algonquin. Co-founder Dr. John Kolb says Alpine has evolved along with major changes in family medicine, many of which he is proud of being associated with as an early adopter.

“It’s been an exciting ride,” Kolb said. “Family medicine itself has gone through a lot of changes. We feel our practice has really been in the vanguard.” Those changes include a major shift in the way family medicine practitioners approach the doctor-patient relationship. “Its changed from the days of going into the hospital and seeing your patient, taking your patient through surgery, delivering babies,” said Kolb, “to a point nowadays where we need to work with inpatient specialists in hospitals to take care of the hospitalized patient.”

Sharon Buckley, an administrator for Alpine Family Physicians, believes there’s an advantage to being treated in a smaller community like Lake Zurich, where old-fashioned concepts of family medicine still thrive. “The most rewarding thing is still taking care of patients one on one,” Buckley said. “We really get a chance to know the whole family. I think that is really what we relish about family practice. It’s high tech with a soft touch.”

Kolb points out that one of the medical community’s biggest advances in the last 20 years, while completely invisible to the patient, is one of the most important enhancements to patient care and safety.

“We’ve migrated to an electronic medical record. I can tell you in old days the medical records were on 3 x 5 index cards. Now we have a server where all the records are kept.”

While the staff at Alpine may have struggled to make the switch to computerized record keeping (along with the rest of the industry), it was a change whose time had come. Computerization means no delays in treatment while waiting for crucial information or trying to decipher another physician’s handwritten notes.

At first glance, switching from the old 3 x 5 card system to an electronic one may seem more of a convenience than a major step forward in patient safety, but Kolb disagrees. “All of the family doctors here really believe it’s a safer environment and it’s in the best interest in the patients. Knowing it’s a safer way of practicing medicine, patients are more apt to accept it knowing it really did improve the quality of medicine.”

For Alpine Family Physicians, more recent changes brought some much needed breathing room. The entire Lake Zurich practice relocated to a new facility at 350 Surryse Road. The building’s 32,000 square feet is a welcome upgrade from the old, much-smaller building Alpine previously occupied. Buckley says as Alpine grew, the old address became less and less sufficient.

“Our Old Rand location was a small, rehabbed facility we used every nook and cranny in. At our old building we were hodgepodged in, but (at the new building) we were able to plan our patient flow.”

That planning included placing essential services in the front where they are most needed; no more navigating patients in and around a mini-obstacle course due to a lack of space.

The move itself was done so quickly most patients wouldn’t have noticed but for the change of address. “We did it all over the weekend,” said Kolb. “We planned for a long time, it was a well planned move to get over here and it was accomplished in a weekend with no disruption in service.”

At the new address, Alpine is located in the same building as a variety of other medical services. “Not only does it house Alpine Family Physicians,” said Buckley, “we have MRI CT imaging services, mammography and we have our own physical therapy on the second floor. Quest Labs has a drawing site here, and Advocate has a rehab center here for speech and occupational therapy.”

The new facility brings many diverse elements of the Lake Zurich medical community under the same roof.

Buckley says Alpine continues to thrive, adding new staff along with new clients. In a community that values old-fashioned doctoring, word of mouth plays an important part in the growth of the practice.

That may not be the most modern or metropolitan way to bring in new clients, but sometimes it’s the most effective one, according to Buckley.

“I think the fact that we’ve been here for so long, that we are adding new physicians…the patients are telling other people about the quality of physicians in the office. It’s a good group of physicians to work for. Otherwise, I wouldn’t still be here.”