A pathology practice in Nebraska visits hospitals in communities that are located hundreds of miles away. With the help of general aviation, these medical professionals can conduct a day’s worth of business in the time that it would take them to travel there by automobile.

“GA has been a part of our consulting practice for over 30 years, and makes serving some of our hospitals possible,” says Dr. Thomas Williams, medical director of the Methodist Pathology Center, Methodist Hospital in Omaha.

The practice’s clinical laboratory serves as a reference laboratory for a number of smaller hospitals in rural Nebraska as well as Iowa and Missouri. Teams of pathologists—physicians who specialize in microscopic diagnosis of tumors and diseases—and medical technicians travel monthly to these client hospitals to provide consultation and review of cases of interest and quality of care issues with the on-site staff. Each visit usually lasts several hours.

Trips to hospitals in neighboring Iowa and Missouri are made by car. But some of the clients, like Rock County Hospital in Bassett, Neb., are located more than 300 miles from Omaha—two-thirds of the way across the state. Such a trip by car would take more than four hours one way to reach a facility that serves fewer than 1,000 people. “It’s a gorgeous part of the state,” says Williams, but he adds that people who are unfamiliar with the Great Plains area of the Midwest don’t realize how rural it is.

That’s why Methodist Hospital has contracted with a local charter that ferries the pathologists in Beech Barons from Millard Airport to these outlying locations.

“General aviation permits us to leave to make that trip in one day,” says Williams. “In some cases, [they will] be back in time to do a little work before dinner.”

The pathologists sometimes are flown into unattended airports so that they can reach client hospitals in locations such as Alma, Cambridge, and Lexington. “There’s no way that we could service” these locations without using GA, says Williams. —By Jill W. Tallman