FEATURE
DR. VALERIE BRIONES-PRYOR
Compassionate Physician Award
Internist Dr. Voltaire Briones remembers the day years ago when his then 13-year-old daughter, Valerie, walked into their Louisville home and, finding him reading a medical journal, announced,“ I want to be a doctor like you.” With a mother who is a family physician as well, young Valerie had plenty of opportunity to get a feel for the practice of medicine, including volunteering at Sts. Mary & Elizabeth Hospital as a student at Sacred Heart Academy, and working in her father’ s south Louisville medical office.
An undergraduate pre-medical degree from Xavier University in Cincinnati, four years at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, and an internal medicine residency at Indiana University gave her the technical knowledge she’ d lacked as a teenager, of course. But hanging around her physician dad taught Dr. Briones-Pryor something else about patient care.“ They didn’ t think of him as their doctor. They thought of him as their friend,” she says, taking as much time as each patient needed to talk, sometimes running hours behind in the office.
Jennifer Nolan, President of KentuckyOne’ s Sts. Mary & Elizabeth and Our Lady of Peace Hospitals, works with Dr. Briones-Pryor in her capacity as Division Medical Director, overseeing in-patient care at those and other KentuckyOne facilities across the state. Nolan says the first word that comes to mind about her is“ compassionate.”
“ She’ s such a team player,” Nolan says.“ She really advocates for patients. She treats them like members of her own family,” not only directing care during a patient’ s hospital stay, but also looking after details, like transportation to follow-up appointments and funds to cover medications over the long haul.
Dr. Briones-Pryor continues to see patients in the hospital about one day a week, but her main focus is on the role of hospitalists like herself – physicians who work exclusively in the hospital, quarterbacking in-patient care and serving as liaisons with patients’ private doctors – like her own father, whose patients’ hospital care she now oversees.
As an administrator, she notes that she provides the flip side of that process – advocating for patients from the point of view of someone who literally holds the hands of individuals unable to advocate for themselves.“ I went into administration because as a single physician, I wasn’ t doing enough to make patient care better on a global scale,” she says.“ We’ re here for the patients. I want to be that voice.”
That includes considering circumstances that will affect a patient’ s post-discharge life. As one example, she describes a recent meeting on how to treat endocarditis – an infection in the lining of the heart that’ s common in drug addicted patients. Such patients require six weeks of antibiotics, clearly exceeding a hospital stay. How does the medical system ensure that such vulnerable individuals get necessary treatment once they return to the environment that caused the acute problem in the first place?“ If we don’ t( also) treat the addiction,” Dr. Briones-Pryor says,“ they’ ll come back with another infection.”
Nolan notes that she manages to balance that deep concern for individual patients with consideration for the hospital itself and her medical colleagues.“ Her nature is to build relationships and rapport with other professionals, her colleagues and our nursing staff,” she says, listening to everyone’ s concerns and developing consensus for decisions in the interests of both patients and staff.
22 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE