Eleven years in a hospital-owned practice, then a different idea entirely.
Dr. Owen Fairweather spent eleven years in a hospital-owned family practice, seeing twenty-two patients a day in appointments booked for eleven minutes each. In his last year there, he counted: he spent more of his working hours documenting visits for insurance billing than he spent in the room with patients.
He left in 2019 to open Meadowbrook Med — a practice with no insurance billing at all, just a flat monthly fee, longer visits, and his actual cell phone number in every patient's phone. The first year had eleven patients and a spreadsheet Ruth Bellamy built by hand, because no off-the-shelf practice software was built for a business that didn't bill insurance.
Dr. Naomi Sorensen joined in 2021, and Dana Alcaraz came on as the practice's first nurse practitioner in 2023, mostly to handle the same-day visits that had started outnumbering everything else. The panel stayed capped at 600 patients per physician the whole time — on purpose, a number chosen specifically so a doctor could still hold the shape of every patient's health in their head without leaning entirely on the chart.
Why "Meadowbrook"
The name comes from the creek that ran behind the practice's first office — a converted farmhouse a few miles outside town, since replaced by a proper building downtown. The water back there was always more reliable than the farmhouse's plumbing ever was, which felt like a fitting enough origin for a practice built on the idea that some things are worth keeping simple and dependable.
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