Picture your typical workday: you arrive at the Lake Russell Medical Building for morning clinic, where you'll see a mix of follow-up patients and new consultations referred by the community's seven family practice physicians who are eager to collaborate with local specialty care. Between clinic sessions, you'll walk next door to the hospital to evaluate inpatient consultations—often patients the hospitalist team admitted overnight and stabilized, now seeking your expertise to guide treatment decisions and determine whether they can be safely managed locally or require transfer for interventional procedures.
This is consultative cardiology at its finest. You're not managing the demanding logistics of an interventional practice or coordinating cath lab schedules. Instead, you're providing the diagnostic and treatment planning expertise that shapes patient care trajectories. The hospitalist team—experienced physicians who understand their scope and genuinely value specialist input—handles the overnight admissions and acute stabilization, then presents patients to you during business hours. This collaborative model means you're consulted when your expertise truly matters, not called at 2 AM for questions that could wait until morning.
Your patient population will reflect the demographics of northeast Georgia: a mix of Medicare-age patients with traditional cardiovascular risk factors, working-age adults managing hypertension and diabetes, and younger patients requiring evaluation for chest pain or palpitations. Many of these patients have been driving 40 minutes to Athens for cardiology care, often delaying necessary follow-up appointments due to transportation challenges or the burden of repeated travel. You'll provide the continuity of care these patients deserve, seeing them through their initial diagnostic workup, medical management, and long-term follow-up—referring only those who genuinely require interventional procedures.
Your clinical work will encompass the full spectrum of non-invasive cardiology: comprehensive cardiovascular risk assessment and management, heart failure evaluation and optimization, arrhythmia diagnosis and medical management, valvular disease assessment, hypertension management in complex cases, and pre-operative cardiac risk stratification. You'll interpret the diagnostic studies performed at the hospital—EKGs, echocardiograms, stress tests, rhythm monitoring, and nuclear medicine studies—and have access to CT and MRI imaging when clinical questions require advanced anatomical assessment. The hospital doesn't have a cath lab or vascular doppler capability currently, though leadership has indicated they can add vascular doppler if you identify this as valuable to your practice.
The call schedule—or rather, the lack thereof—deserves special emphasis because it's genuinely unusual in cardiology. You will have no nights, no weekends, and no call responsibilities. Read that again, because it's the kind of statement that most cardiologists have learned to be skeptical about. But this position structure is intentionally designed this way: the hospitalist team is comfortable managing overnight admissions and acute presentations, with your consultative input available the next business day. For the rare truly emergent cases requiring immediate interventional cardiology, the existing transfer protocols to Piedmont Athens Regional remain in place.
This means your evenings and weekends are genuinely yours. You won't be interrupted during your daughter's soccer game or your Saturday morning on Lake Russell. You won't face the grinding fatigue of being awakened multiple times weekly for questions that could reasonably wait until morning. The hospital leadership understands that this schedule is essential for recruiting a cardiologist to a community practice, and the hospitalist team has been functioning with this model during the years without cardiology coverage.
While you'll begin as the solo cardiologist, this isn't a position where you'll remain professionally isolated indefinitely. The practice structure allows for future growth: once your patient volume justifies it, the hospital is open to adding PA or NP support to help with follow-up visits and routine patient management. If the practice grows substantially, there's potential for recruiting a second cardiologist, which would provide collegial interaction and shared call coverage should you choose to expand services in the future.
Your relationship with Piedmont Athens Regional for transfers and interventional referrals also provides connection to tertiary cardiology expertise. You'll be making the clinical decisions about which patients truly require interventional procedures, which need advanced heart failure management, and which can be safely and effectively managed with your non-invasive expertise—the kind of clinical judgment that defines excellent consultative cardiology.
The cardiac rehabilitation program, which opened in January 2024 and is already outgrowing its space due to rapid growth, provides an excellent resource for your post-MI and post-procedure patients. Many patients currently travel to Athens for interventional procedures then return to complete cardiac rehab locally at Elbert Memorial, which speaks to both the quality of the rehab program and the community's preference for local care when possible. Your presence will create even stronger continuity, with you managing the complete care continuum from initial presentation through rehabilitation and long-term secondary prevention.
This is cardiology practiced the way it should be: you'll have the time and diagnostic resources to thoroughly evaluate patients, the professional autonomy to make clinical decisions based on evidence and experience rather than productivity pressures, and the satisfaction of knowing that your clinical expertise is genuinely valued by both your physician colleagues and the patients who have been waiting for cardiology services to return to their community.