In our running series, Sollis in Six, we pose six questions to a team member to give you an inside look at #LifeAtSollis.

Dr. Carolyn McClain
Medical Director, San Francisco

Dr. Carolyn McClain attended The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and completed an emergency medicine residency at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. Before Sollis, Dr. McClain spent 15 years at the Emergency Physicians Professional Association in Minnesota in various roles including Medical Director, MD, Assistant Medical Director of Urgency Rooms, and Quality Improvement Assistant Director. She is board-certified in emergency medicine and sits on the board of several committees including Twin Cities Medical Society and the American College of Emergency Physicians Advocacy Committee.

1. What motivated you to join the team as Medical Director in San Francisco at Sollis Health?
   Sollis is a disrupter in the healthcare space and has created a new way of delivering emergent and urgent care. It was exciting to have the opportunity to grow the Northern California market from the ground up and work with a start-up that has tremendous growth potential.
2. Tell us about Sollis’ new San Francisco Flagship location, what makes it different than other urgent and emergency care centers?
   Sollis’ San Francisco location is a 5,000-square-foot state-of-the-art medical facility that has six exam rooms, a full imaging suite with a top-of-the-line Siemens SOMATOM go.Top 128 slice CT scanner, and a Siemens 3T MRI, and an in-house CLIA-certified lab. Our membership model allows for a much more personalized experience for our members and our providers are able to spend substantial time with each of our members truly taking time to care for them. In addition to our Flagship facility, we offer house calls in the San Francisco Bay area.
3. What is the culture like at Sollis Health in San Francisco?
   The culture here is rooted in the dynamic and diverse professionals who come together as a team to give our members a premium experience. Our team members have come from highly recognized hospitals in the Bay Area and are made up of board-certified emergency Physicians, Nurse Practitioners, Physician Assistants, Registered Nurses, Radiology Technologists who specialize in Xray, CT and MRI, and administrative staff, all of whom are committed to the central mission of delivering great healthcare. Practicing medicine at Sollis is a sharply contrasted experience to practicing in a typical Emergency Department setting; our patient volume is low due to our membership model and this gives us the opportunity to holistically assess and plan care, focus on achieving a high level of satisfaction and achieving the best possible outcomes for our members. This is a place where we use our well-honed clinical skills and diagnostic abilities in a low-stress environment that allows us to practice medicine from a more humanistic perspective.
4. Tell us about the types of cases you often treat.
   At our San Francisco Flagship, our focus is providing rapid access to care for the urgent and emergent health issues of our members which we deliver through telehealth, house calls and in-person at our clinic. We have a full range of laboratory and diagnostic imaging equipment available to patients in-house, with rapid turnaround time for results. Our patients present with everything from sinusitis to atrial fibrillation requiring cardioversion or shoulder dislocation requiring procedural sedation. If a patient presents with a critical illness, we can stabilize the patient and then we would transfer to a hospital.
5. What is one thing you often hear from Sollis members?
   “Thank you!” I have received more thank you notes in the past six months at Sollis than I have received in my 20-plus years as an emergency physician.
6. Tell us one thing you love to do outside of work – for fun, for your well-being.
   I love to hike, travel internationally and read novels.