HJBR Jul/Aug 2019

dialogue 16 JUL / AUG 2019 I  Healthcare Journal of baton rouge   less expensive, resulted in less morbidity, resulted in improved survival, and from that came interest leading to expansion. Editor  How do you get so many good doc- tors and team members? Walker  People were excited about what we were doing. They were seeing the results we were having in terms of improvingmortality and saving limbs. In the communities where CIS was, these physicians reached out, want- ing to become part of this.We were also, over the years, training doctors throughout the world to perform these procedures. Many of these doctors would come through and say, “I want to be part of this. Do you need other people towork with?”That’s really how it grew. It was never a plan to become big. That was never a focus. The focus was care. The growth came out of the results we got from caring. Editor H ow important is early detection? What should medical providers and patients know with regards to early detection? Walker  Early detection is crucial. Unfor- tunately in medicine today, we often get patients with very advanced disease where there may already be extensive tissue dam- age. If we could get to the patients earlier, always we can improve the outcomes. That’s true in all parts of medicine. But historically, we got to these patients very late and so we believe early detection is important. For instance, If I simply don’t feel a pulse in a patients foot and he’s not symptomatic, he’s not going to get an intervention such as bal- loon angioplasty or a stent or an atherec- tomy, but he is going to get an intervention. We’re going to speak to him about the need to control blood pressure, about the need to exercise, about controlling cholesterol, perhaps taking and anti-platelet agent. So we’re going to aggressively treat that patient medically, because we’ve identified someone