As tide of uninsured rises, Houck oversees expansion at Johnson Health Center

By Darrell Laurant

Published: November 19, 2008

There is an engine inside Dr. Peter Houck that isn’t readily apparent from the outside.

 
What: Johnson Health Center expansion open house
Location: 407 Federal St. (near the corner of Fifth and Federal).
Time: 11 a.m.-2 p.m. on Fri-day.
Activities: Tours of the build-ing’s renovated interior, currently in progress, a noon ribbon cut-ting, all open to the public.
Friday night: A black tie din-ner dance will be held at the Holiday Inn Select to celebrate the Johnson Health Center’s 10th anniversary. The Almost Brothers Band will supply music; tickets are $50 per person. (Call Kathy Allen at 434-947-5967, ext. 239, for more information.)

Seated in his tiny Johnson Health Center office on a recent afternoon, he was wearing a white lab coat over a dress shirt with a bow tie. Coupled with white pants and spectacles, it gave him the retro look of one of those cream-suited Southern lawyers from the 1930s.

He was ticking off all the ways public and private health care have changed during his last 35 years in Lynchburg, all of it seem-ingly conspiring to direct a rising tide of patients to the doors of the Federal Street facility he helped to found in 1998.

“We’re the only Medicaid game in town anymore,” Houck said, “and a lot of doctors have stopped taking Medicare. All those patients now come to us, including the uninsured.”

They come in waves, from an average of 2,500 a year in 1998 to a projected 15,000 in 2009. And that’s fine with Houck.

“I’m glad we’re able to serve them,” he said. “One nice thing is we can track these Medicaid kids from pre-natal exams through their childhood years. I’m glad we’re here to do that.”

What didn’t make him glad in recent years was the overflow of humanity in the clinic’s waiting room. Soon, that will change — and in a way that couldn’t be more perfect for the center’s smooth operation.

“We managed to get this build-ing right across the street,” Houck said, “and that will be primarily a place for women and children’s services.”

Not just any building, but a vast one-level expanse that used to be an auto dealership and a Sheltered Workshop space be-fore it was taken over by a book-binding company. It is literally steps from the Johnson Health Center building on Federal, di-rectly abutting Fifth, and it goes on forever.

On Friday, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., an open house will be held at the new Johnson Health Cen-ter Women & Children’s Services building, including a noon ribbon cutting, tours of the interior (currently in full renovation mode) and refreshments.

At a black tie dinner and dance Friday night in the Holiday Inn Select, marking the 10th anni-versary of the Johnson Health Center, the first Dr. Peter Houck Services Award will be presented — and the first one will go to its namesake.

“He’s a doer,” Laura Dupuy, executive director of the Lynchburg Neighborhood Devel-opment Foundation, said of Houck. “He’s used to making things happen.”

Although it will officially be-long to the Johnson Health Cen-ter and a new program for the elderly that is in the planning stages and will share the build-ing, the former Victory Motors dealership also belongs, in a very real sense, to Houck and Dupuy.

“I got a call very early one morning, about 4:30, that a fire alarm had gone off there,” Dupuy said, “so I rolled out of bed, got dressed and drove over. When I arrived, I saw Peter’s car out-side.”

It was Dupuy who cobbled to-gether the complicated financing that made the acquisition of the building doable.

“We had actually been looking at another block between Harri-son and Federal, with the John-son Health Center as a possibility,” Dupuy said. “That didn’t come together, and then the H.B. Brooks Company announced it was selling the building at Fifth and Federal, and it just seemed a natural fit.”

The process involved placing the 1930s-era building on the national and state historic regis-tries (with the accompanying tax credits), securing a $450,000 loan from the Industrial Development Authority and tapping into sev-eral other national sources cre-ated to aid civic-minded devel-opment. The total was $4.8 mil-lion, and the process, Dupuy said, “aged me more than any-thing else I’ve ever done.

“I really want to see Fifth Street (development) happen, though, and this can only help.”

For Peter Houck, it’s just an-other brick in a Central Virginia medical system that has evolved over time. A Lynchburg native, he graduated from Virginia Military Institute and the University of Virginia Medical School — fol-lowed by a stint with the Army Medical Corps in the Vietnam era — and seems to have combined the personal discipline of the military with the empathy of the healer.

“I’ve always had a soft spot for kids,” said Houck, who began his career as a pediatrician and still serves in that capacity at John-son, “and it will be a very good thing to give them their own place. We’re going to have a whole kid-friendly waiting room.”

That will happen after the first of the year, when the carpet layers and painters and carpen-ters finally exit the building.

Houck can hardly wait. But it doesn’t show.