LITTLE ROCK—H. Graves Hearnsberger, III, MD, knew he wanted to be a surgeon after spending three summers as an operating room scrub tech at St. Vincent’s Infirmary. He was fascinated by surgery, and decided on an ENT specialty after a rotation with James Suen, MD, at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock. 

“Dr. Suen is a wonderful mentor, and has such great passion for his work,” said Hearnsberger, who specializes in general otolaryngology, rhinology and endoscopic sinus surgery. “He is an outstanding teacher. I felt if I was lucky enough to get one of the residency spots to do ENT when I finished medical school, he would be a good physician to operate under.”

Now having practiced ENT for more than 20 years, Hearnsberger is particularly known for his expertise in sinus surgery. One thing that continues to make the work particularly satisfying for him is the scope of knowledge and diversity required to be an ENT.

“It is fun to figure it all out,” Hearnsberger said. “And it is very gratifying to help fix people’s problems with ENT. One thing I love about ENT is a lot of diagnoses we deal with are things we can fix or cure, so it is rewarding to be a problem solver. I think it is difficult for many physicians who deal exclusively with chronic disease. I have some chronic disease patients, but not as many as some parts of medicine.”

Hearnsberger, who practices at St. Vincent Infirmary and Baptist Health Medical Center, is part of the Arkansas Ototolaryngology Center that includes 16 ENTs. He practices in a satellite office in midtown Little Rock. He feels one of the main reasons he has been successful in his career is because of his association with this group.

“Any physician with a great reputation must be part of an organization that supports great patient care,” Hearnsberger said. “Without great staff to support you, you can’t make the patients happy. You can’t have high patient satisfaction without an excellent office staff and great administration. That is one thing I’m very blessed with. I have an outstanding group of physicians to work with and a very dedicated staff. I’m fortunate to have such professional people working for me. It makes my life easy, and it makes patients happy.”

His experience is that when patients end up dissatisfied with a clinic, it may be that they love their physician, but they’ve had difficulties dealing with the office staff.

One common complaint with patients is waiting long periods of time to get in to see the doctor. Physicians can avoid those problems by showing up on time, and coordinating with staff to not over schedule the number of patients.

“Stay on schedule and don’t overbook,” he recommends. “Some really successful physicians can have too many people who want to see them. Some are in such incredible demand that they have trouble saying ‘no’ to new patients. That can end up with too many people waiting to see them. I’m fortunate in my situation, as we have a good approach to the whole problem. My staff keeps my patients happy.”

One major change in medicine in the past ten years has seen costs contained by managed care from primary physicians and Hearnsberger says it is going to stay that way. 

“We as specialists are left to take care of problems that can’t be solved by primary care physicians, or involve a level of expertise primary care physicians can’t be expected to attain,” Hearnsberger said. “All in all, the primary care community of Arkansas does an excellent job of understanding when someone needs be to referred on to get further evaluated or managed. Errors made by primary care physicians not referring to a specialist when they should are really less common now than earlier in my practice. By and large, we are fortunate with our primary care physicians. There are just not enough of them.”

The biggest development in ENT in the past 20 years is endoscopic sinus surgery. That trend began as Hearnsberger was finishing his residency in the late 1980s.

“Endoscopic sinus surgery is now the mainstay,” Hearnsberger said. “It has revolutionized the practice. Other than that, there has not been a lot of change in the management of common ENT problems other than managing them to be more cost efficient.”

One way to do that is to be what he calls a “cautious adopter” of new technology.

“Unless I can prove it saves me time, the patient money, and creates better results, I’m not going to adopt it,” he said. “I think a lot of things are a little gimmicky and high tech. I’m not sure all the time they are worth the added cost and trouble to institute. It has to be better and cheaper. An example is the use of lasers to remove tonsils. It has pretty much been decided it is not more effective and it costs a lot more.”

Hearnsberger did his undergraduate studies at Southwestern in Memphis before attending medical school at UAMS. He and his artist wife, Cheryl, have twin daughters, Allie and Erin, 20, who are juniors at Ole Miss. His leisure time activities include golf, running, hunting and fishing. 

“I’m excited about getting together with my brother and friends for this year’s duck and deer season,” Hearnsberger said.

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