Childhood dream becomes reality

For as long as he can remember, Dr. Thomas Pinson has been interested in medicine.

“In junior high school, I was a member of the medical club, which was for students interested in medicine,” Pinson said. “During college, I struggled with my faith and what was necessary to be acceptable to God and decided to attend seminary. After years of this struggle, including two in seminary, I awakened to the fact that we are acceptable to God because we are His, not because of what we do.  I left seminary much more whole and ready for a career in medicine. I went back to college to finish my pre-med prerequisites, entering medical school in 1990 to complete the path I had begun even as a child.”

Now he is the medical director of the emergency department (ED) at Freeman Neosho Hospital.

With his position, he has many responsibilities.

“I am responsible for the medical operations of the ED,” he said. “I review care given in the ED for appropriateness and effectiveness.”

And for the future of the ED, he and his entire staff as a team are working “to continually improve the quality, effectiveness, and resiliency (same level of care each and every visit; eliminating variation) of the care we provide.”

Pinson went on to say that they are adapting to the “best practices” from around the country, and the world, to Freeman Neosho ED.

“We are working on ED processes to improve patient flow to provide more rapid care without losing effectiveness and quality,” he said. “We are working on improvements to lower costs, again, without sacrificing effectiveness and quality. We are actively participating with the state, local EMS agencies, and the entire Freeman Health System in creating and adapting the principles of the new Time Critical Diagnosis System, which replaces the current Trauma System.  The is the first in the country statewide system of incorporating time-critical medical problems into the current trauma system to improve timely care of heart attack and stroke as we do for trauma.”

Pinson stated the local hospital/ED unit has undertaken multiple strategies to assess patient satisfaction. 

“Importantly, we are not researching this for a billboard advertisement score, but for patient comments that will help us provide the human touch patients and families need for care and comfort in the face of whatever disease from which they suffer,” he said. “These are only a few of the initiatives we hope to undertake to make Freeman Neosho ED a model for emergency care in the U.S. and the world.”

Pinson graduated from Mississippi College in 1984, with a bachelor’s of arts in philosophy, then attended Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for two years before returning to undergraduate studies in pre-med. He then attended St. George’s University School of Medicine in Grenada, West Indies for the first two years of medical school. 

He then transferred to and graduated from the Medical College of Pennsylvania, now Drexel University School of Medicine, in Philadelphia, in 1994.

Pinson completed a one-year general surgery internship at Robert Packer Hospital in Sayre, Penn., before completing an emergency medicine residency at the University of Mississippi in Jackson, Miss., in 1998.

“I came to work for Freeman Health System right out of residency in 1998,” Pinson said. “I left in 2003 to become the ED Medical Director at Mercy Hospital in Independence, Kan. The last two years I spent creating my own staffing company, kind of a temporary doctor, providing ED staffing in Florida, Colorado, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.  During this time, I completed a master’s in business administration from Aspen University in 2005.”

March 1 of this year he returned to Freeman Health System.

Asked where he sees himself in the next few years, Pinson said he would strive to create “the best ED” in the world, right here in Neosho.

“My goal is to make our hospital ED the example for everyone else to follow,” said Pinson. “We will be leaders and not duplicators or followers of the latest fad or theory of ED practice.”

As far as his role as an ED medical director, Pinson said he sees it becoming the leader/coach of a “well-oiled self-directed” team of medical professionals focused on the best in the world.  “Many of the initiatives we plan to undertake are from the staff, not from the ‘head office,’” Pinson said.
“Freeman Neosho ED has some of the most dedicated staff to their department that I have ever worked with. We may not always know at the outset how to get where we want to be, but we do know where we want to be. We intend to work together to achieve success.”