Having spent much of his career as a Kaiser Permanente cardiologist, Dr. Robert Cooper is a strong proponent of the preventative care philosophy.
“Early on, health care was ‘sick care,’” he says, describing the midcentury attitude that hospitals functioned only to treat patients with demonstrable symptoms of illness. “They didn’t pay too much attention to promoting health.”
This holistic healthcare model is often reflected in the clinics Dr. Cooper volunteers with through a telehealth platform called MAVEN Project.
MAVEN Project is a nonprofit healthcare organization linking physician volunteers with clinics caring for underserved and underinsured patients nationwide via telehealth technology. Through its growing reach, MAVEN Project has helped patients and communities around the country – who might not otherwise be able to receive specialized care – connect with specialists like Dr. Cooper.
Dr. Cooper says he chose to specialize in cardiology because of the tangible, mechanical quality of cardiovascular systems.
“A lot of medicine is at a small level, but a lot of cardiology is like old-fashioned engineering, with pumps and valves and so on,” he says.
After completing medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, Dr. Cooper moved west. He did his cardiology fellowship at Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco (now Pacific Medical Center) and spent the next 30 years treating patients at the Kaiser Permanent hospital in Oakland.
He says the prepaid health care model eliminated the “chaos of medicine today, worrying about getting tests approved, or whether the patient has insurance.”
These concerns are just a few of the issues that MAVEN Project is working to address in its clinic partnerships today. Dr. Cooper joined in 2015, early in MAVEN Project’s journey, and shortly after his own retirement.
“Retirement gives me the opportunity to keep my hands in some clinical things.” The satisfaction, he says, is in “being part of a team that’s really trying to provide care for the underserved.”
Dr. Cooper has worked with clinics in central California and south Florida, usually for patients with little or no insurance and very little money to pay for care. His cases range from patients with heart palpitations, chest pain, or shortness of breath to heart murmurs and high blood pressure. In one case, he was able to reassure an anxious medical team that a patient’s potentially serious symptoms were, in fact, non-threatening.
“General practitioners doing the bulk of the work sometimes have questions,” he says. “So it’s nice to have a more experienced doctor on the case.”
Dr. Cooper also recognizes the drawbacks of a virtual platform. “Telemedicine as we’re doing it still delivers that gratifying feeling [of treating a patient], but… I think we’ve got a long way to go to recreate the experience of spending a day in a free clinic.”
While telemedicine is still in its early stages, MAVEN Project’s mission to provide care for uninsured populations is still one that resonates deeply with Dr. Cooper.
“We’re recognizing that there is a major problem with all these uninsured patients, and we’d all be better off if we took care of them,” he says. “The internet is connecting us and allowing us to do really good things for people that really need it.”
