Mayo Regional Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft, Millinocket Regional Hospital and Penobscot Valley Hospital in Lincoln decided several years ago that there was a big demand for ear, nose (ENT) surgical care in their region of Penobscot and Piscataquis counties, yet getting access to referrals to that specialty in Bangor was not easy.
All three hospitals also realized that none of them, alone, had the patient volume to support a full-time ENT. Sharing a position thus became the goal.
A general ENT physician in such a rural area is a tough recruit. Typically such specialists like to be near big medical centers. Several candidates come through over a couple of years, but it wasn’t until February of this year that the hospitals, with the help of the Maine Hospital Association's Maine Recruitment Center found the right person. Brian Miller, M.D. will start this August, spending two days each week at Mayo, and two days each week, every other week at both Millinocket and Lincoln. Miller is expected to live in the Dover-Foxcroft area and travel one hour to both MRH and PVH.
Miller earned his B.A. in zoology at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., then got a M.S. at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He took a circuitous route to medicine, working as a firefighter/paramedic and Forest Service smokejumper out West for a number of years before coming back east for medical school at Penn State. He finished his otolaryngology residency at University of Utah in 2007, and has had fellowship training for the past year at Washington University in St. Louis in head, neck and microvascular reconstruction. Miller is an outdoorsman who likes fly fishing and has had his fill of big cities, and it was the natural beauty of the area, as well as the freedom of his unique traveling surgical job, were what attracted him to three hospitals
This recruitment is just one example of how hospitals in Maine cooperate to benefit the health of their communities. .