Health provider couple treating Jefferson City's underserved patients

Inspired by his forefathers who served their community as natural healers, Elochukwu Osoego has wanted to be involved in medicine since he was 6 years old.

Now, Osoego is a physician assistant (PA) who owns and operates a medical clinic with his wife in Jefferson City.

A physician assistant can diagnose patients, develop treatment plans and write prescriptions, but must do so in collaboration with a licensed physician. They can also practice medicine in any medical specialty area and healthcare setting.

Osoego's path to medicine took him from Onitsha, his hometown in the Anambra state of Nigeria, to medical school in Ukraine and finally to Missouri, where his goals would come to fruition.

Osoego was in medical school in Ukraine for two years before he and some of the others learned their school wasn't accredited. Still determined to get into the field, Osoego came to Missouri in 2007.

During his time in Missouri, he met his wife, Dara Osoego, became a PA and opened his own clinic.

Now in the United States, Osoego still had to work to get into medicine. One of the biggest challenges was becoming a PA, something Osoego said wasn't easy.

"PA education is very rigorous. PA school is like medical school condensed into two years. The volume of material you have to know is enormous. It's a lot of information to synthesize and be able to come up with different diagnoses when you have a patient talking to you," Osoego said.

Osoego has worked in an emergency room for the past five years. Something he noticed during his time in the ER is most of the patients don't actually need to be there. Many of the patients he saw, Osoego said, needed more than urgent care but less than emergency room care.

That's where Osoego saw an opportunity.

During their marriage, Osoego and Dara Osoego had a shared, long-term goal of opening a clinic together. Dara Osoego became a nurse practitioner (NP) in 2016, which would complement Osoego's skills when he became a PA in 2018.

"We had talked about opening a clinic but didn't know it would happen so soon. With COVID, how COVID happened, we were kind of responding to a need actually," Osoego said.

Osoego and his wife co-founded Innovative Medical Clinic in Jefferson City in July 2022. Together, the couple owns and operates the clinic, seeing patients and managing the business side of the clinic.

The clinic fills the gap between urgent care and the ER, Osoego said. They also wanted to offer healthcare options to minorities and under/uninsured patients.

As a PA and an NP, the couple can treat sore throats and abdominal pain, do labs, fix lacerations and drainage, do ultrasounds, administer IV fluids and medicine and more. The clinic is also only a couple of doors down from Advanced Radiology, so they can order X-rays, MRIs, CT scans and other services with ease, Osoego said.

The Osoegos are accompanied at the clinic by Dr. Debra Atkinson, a physician, and Dr. Joel Blackburn, a physician and the medical director at the clinic.

Successfully opening their own clinic has presented its own challenges, Osoego said. One of the challenges they face is some patients' resistance to getting care from a PA.

"There are still some patients that are not very receptive to the idea of a PA taking care of them. I've been able to convince some of those patients, not just by words but by the level of care and expertise that I've put in. I hope in the future as we increase awareness of the PA profession we're going to see less and less of those patients," Osoego said.

Another challenge that sometimes arises is racism, Osoego said. Sometimes patients don't want him to provide them with care because of the color of his skin, Osoego said, but you still have to do the best you can for them.

Becoming a PA and opening a medical clinic could have been the end of Osoego's journey, but he decided he still wanted to do more for people; In addition to running a clinic, Osoego also mentors students.

His first "mentee" was Raymond Okolo. Okolo also came to Jefferson City from Nigeria and wanted to go into medicine, similar to Osoego. The two met at a barbershop in 2019, where Osoego introduced Okolo to the PA profession and its possibilities.

Okolo was fascinated by the profession and Osoego took him under his wing. Okolo was actually at the grand opening of Innovative Medical Clinic and shadowed Osoego as he worked with patients.

"It was kind of cool to explain some of the things we do, the reasons we were getting the labs we were getting and just kind of watching the same kind of childlike wonderment that I had when I first came to see what a PA could do. It was cool to see it from the other perspective, from the perspective of him looking at me," Osoego said.

Other than Okolo, who is now pursuing his own PA education, Osoego has a few students he's actively mentoring. He said he's currently working on something in the background that will significantly help Black students, but couldn't say more yet.

He said he wants to inspire everyone, but especially wants to inspire Black students because of the health disparities present in many Black communities.

For people who want to become PAs or for a PA who wants to open their own clinic, Osoego said to "just do the work."

"It is possible," Osoego said. "You can become a PA, you can own your own clinic. You just have to do your due diligence and find a collaborative physician who is very receptive to the idea of a PA owning a clinic, somebody that you trust and who trusts you as well, somebody you can work well with."

On the business side, he recommended looking into the Small Business Development Center. He specifically said to reach out to Lauren Carter, whether you're wanting to open a clinic or another business.

"I've always wanted to do something in medicine. There was no other path for me. My grandfather and his grandfather, they were all natural healers. Since I was a kid, I've always been fascinated with curing disease and talking to people, getting to know them.

"One of the things people forget is medicine is both science and art," he said. "You have to talk to patients to get the information and then use your knowledge to make sense of what that patient is telling you. So one of the reasons I became a PA is to help -- it sounds so cliche, but it is true -- just to help people."