By Elizabeth Cogar, Style Weekly Writer; (excerpt from Style Weekly, February 19, 2002)

Dr. Kevin Fergusson left private practice a year ago after 13 years in the office. He didn't leave his family practice behind strictly due to the constraints of managed care, but the impact the insurance structure has on medicine did not escape him. "Rather than a retail industry, it's become a contract industry," he says, referring to the contracts doctors have with insurance companies. "Care is delivered according to contracts," not according to need.

While he doesn't rule out a return to seeing patients, he's focused on other aspects of the doctor-patient relationship at the moment. "I'm kind of a hybrid person," he says. With a master's in health administration, earned from MCV in 1995, Fergusson now teaches a college class on health-care marketing and runs a small business that produces a tool designed to serve both doctor and patient. It's a directory called DrPEN--PEN is an acronym for Patient Education Network.

The directory is a reference for patient education on the Internet. Categorized by diagnosis codes that are uniform worldwide, i.e. heartburn or fibromyalgia or anemia, the book lists a special DrPEN Web address for more information on these conditions. The doctor can jot down the site for the patient, and the patient can then go home and read up.

The idea to produce DrPEN came from Fergusson's own experience on the job. "I became concerned about physicians and the pressure on them," he says. "No one was focusing on their needs. The pressure, as I saw it, was causing doctors' ability to communicate with patients to be compromised. I decided to devote myself to being positive and helping physicians."

Of his switch to business, Fergusson says, "I do miss seeing patients. It was a difficult decision, and I haven't completely decided what I'm going to do."

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