St. Mary’s Hospital is working with a new group of doctors to provide pulmonary care services formerly provided by the late Dr. Krishnan Raghavan.
Raghavan, 52, of West Glenville, had been the hospital’s pulmonary care specialist until his death in June. Raghavan and two other people, Mathai Kolath George, 41, of Rexford, and his son George Kolath, 11, were in a single-engine Piper Cherokee that took off from the Mohawk Valley Airport on Route 5 and crashed into the Mohawk River. All three drowned when the plane sank.
“We realized there was a need, unfortunately, with the untimely death of Kris Raghavan,” said Dr. Peter Weinberg of Schenectady Pulmonary and Critical Care Associates.
Eight doctors from the group, which already works in Ellis and Sunnyview Rehabilitation hospitals, will be rotating through St. Mary’s Hospital to fulfill the need for pulmonary medical services there.
Since September, Weinberg said, the group’s doctors have been providing a full range of pulmonary care services to inpatients and outpatients at the hospital, including critically ill patients in intensive care and lung cancer patients. The group also performs various inpatient and outpatient procedures and sleep studies. They are the only pulmonary care specialists at the hospital.
The eight doctors rotate through the hospital seeing six to 12 patients a day. They are leasing space in Raghavan’s old office, which they furnished with new equipment, Weinberg said.
“The hospital is a very good place to work. The people are really nice and the physicians are really good,” he said. “I’m really impressed.”
Dr. Tim Shoen, vice president of medical affairs at St. Mary’s Hospital, said the group is expected to “stabilize our situation for years to come.”
He said recruiting a pulmonary specialist is a difficult thing to do. Some small private practices with a few doctors recruit for years before finding another to join their practice, he said.
“We had a void after Dr. Raghavan died and had the Schenectady Pulmonary group not expanded we would have had a difficult time trying to recruit someone else,” Shoen said.
Shoen said having the Schenectady pulmonary group in the area gives local residents “access to state of the art pulmonary medicine and sleep disorder medicine without having to leave the area.”
Categories: Schenectady County
