Making a profound difference
Recruited to a small Georgia county hospital, Jason Laney 11MR knows his work matters
When Jason Laney first considered the debt-erasing offer to practice medicine in a rural Georgia county, he knew other doors would close. A cardiology fellowship, for example.
“But now looking back, thank God I chose this,” he said of that pivotal decision in 2013. “I love where I am at.”
By joining Jeff Davis Hospital in the county of the same name, located 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, Laney’s $150,000 in medical debt was repaid. He and his wife Laura Bixler Laney have raised their three sons in a county of less than 15,000 people, giving them the kind of parental support that Laney had growing up in the Atlanta suburb of Fayetteville. Now his sons are 7, 14 and 18, and the Laneys love attending their sports events and spending lots of time together at their home in Hazlehurst.
Family: the heart of Laney’s story
His recruitment began through Laura, whom he had met as undergraduates at University of Georgia. Laney played fullback for the Georgia Bulldogs and channeled his drive and discipline from sports into his medical training. Laney graduated magna cum laude from UGA with a biology degree and rose to the top 1 percent of medical students at Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon. At Emory School of Medicine, he was named the most outstanding internal medicine resident in 2011.
They had their first son while Laney was in medical school at Mercer and their second during his Emory residency. Her father was a physician with a family practice in Hazlehurst and introduced Laney to the CEO at Jeff Davis Hospital at that time. In return for Laney practicing there for five years, the hospital would pay his student loans.
“We knew money would be tight, so we agreed,” Laney recalled.
After five years, however, Laney didn’t want to leave. He was fulfilled by using all the tools that he had learned at Emory School of Medicine. From the beginning, he had implemented protocols that made the hospital operate better and raise the standard of care. In a big hospital, he might not have any voice in how it was run. At Jeff Davis Hospital, Laney had a lot of opportunities and accountability.
“There are no specialists, so I’m kind of on my own, which is challenging,” he said. “I was prepared by Emory and was able to handle a lot of stuff, and I had to rely on that.”
In 2021 Laney scrambled to save the life of the unvaccinated local high school principal, who had COVID-19. Laney’s hospital has only four ICU beds. The low vaccination rate in Jeff Davis County put it on one list of the 20 most dangerous counties in the nation.
Because the hospital has no intensive care specialist, Laney stepped in with the critical care skills he learned at Emory. He even called other ICU specialists around the state for help. The principal was helicoptered to Northside Hospital, recovered, and returned to a parade through Hazlehurst. The county named Laney its 2022 Citizen of the Year.
“Because of COVID, we had a crash course in critical care nursing and managing aspects of critical patients, and a majority of our staff had not had that training,” Laney said. “Now we are a much better facility for handling critical patients.”
Apart from the hospital, Laney Internal Medicine Group began in 2018 when he took over the practice of a retiring Hazelhurst doctor. When asked what traits make a rural physician successful, Laney answered quickly with two points.
- Know your limits. “You have to know when someone in the ER needs to go to Savannah or Macon.”
- Get out in the community. Talking to people at a ball game or church is super important to drawing patients. “How you’re perceived, how you interact with people outside the hospital, is really big. It takes a certain personality to be successful.”
Everything is five minutes away
Throughout his childhood, Laney was interested in becoming a doctor because he spent so much time in medical settings. He had Hirschsprung's disease, a congenital issue caused by missing nerve cells in his colon. He underwent surgeries on his large intestine. “I had so much respect for doctors, and that's what I wanted to be,” he said.
As an Emory resident, Laney experienced the tension between his ambitions as a doctor and as a parent. The hours on the job and commuting made him miss much of his oldest son’s childhood.
“My availability to my kids is definitely the most important thing for me,” he said. “I missed years of his life and feel terrible about it, and now that I’m here [in Hazlehurst] that won’t happen. Everything is five minutes away and I coach them in every sport that they play.”
His own Emory mentors are never far away from Laney’s mind. He credits Dr. David Krakow with teaching him how to break down every disease process to the molecular level; Dr. Kimberly Manning with how to act toward patients and the community; and Dr. David Quintero with how to prepare for critically ill patients.
“He wouldn't let me get away with half-answers,” Laney said of Quintero. “He demanded I know everything about the patient and the treatment plans for each patient. He was instrumental in providing the tools I needed to treat critical patients that I still use to this day.”
Story by Michelle Hiskey
Photos courtesy of Dr. Jason Laney