By Mariah Taylor

Corpus Christi, Texas-based Driscoll Children’s Hospital has spent the last 26 years flying its specialty physicians and nurses to meet patients at clinics.

Driscoll serves 33 counties in Texas, an area the size of many states. Many of its patients are on Medicare, have limited access to specialty care and must drive hours to reach it. This requires parents to take off a full day of work to attend a 30-minute appointment.

“Families may or may not have the resources to make the trip,” said Eric Hamon, president and CEO of the system. “We were seeing cancellations. We wanted to improve access for the underserved. So we partnered with another nonprofit and invested in six airplanes.”

The program started in 2000 with two planes and has grown to a six-plane fleet that includes a Beechcraft King Air 200, a King Air 90 and four Pilatus PC-12 aircrafts. The program is supported by philanthropy gifts from the community and a portion of operational support from the system. Plane operations are managed by Sterling Air Service while the clinical schedule is handled by the hospital’s front office medical office specialists.

How it works

When a child needs specialty care, their pediatrician makes a referral to Driscoll Children’s for either emergent or nonemergent care. Families then make an appointment with the specialist to be seen at their local facility.

On the hospital side, all of the roughly 150 physicians are eligible to be flown to patients. Who is sent is determined by specialty and schedule. For example, if a patient has a surgical appointment on Wednesday, the pediatric surgeon who does not have surgery scheduled at the hospital that day will be sent.

“All of them have an obligation to fly if needed,” Mr. Hamon said. “Our number one priority is the patient. If the patient needs us, we’re going to go and take care to them.”

For outpatient clinic visits, clinicians fly to the clinic and return the same day, but for procedures or surgeries, clinicians stay for “as long as it takes,” Mr. Hamon said.

Although the system does offer telehealth appointments, it found that patients and families prefer the initial appointment to be face to face. It is more common for follow-up appointments to be done over telehealth.

“Our policy for that first visit is that we go, we see the patient, we meet the family and we build that relationship,” Mr. Hamon said.

The results

In 2025, the program completed 766 physician flights across Texas. The program also worked with Driscoll’s 24/7 critical care transport team to provide mobile ICU capacities across 31 counties, and performed 825 patient transports via fixed wing.

The flight program has at least doubled access for specialty care in many counties, Mr. Hamon said.

“There is no doubt that access and the number of physicians going to those markets has increased significantly,” he said. “We’ve added physicians, we’ve added nurses and we’ve added patients, and we’ve seen a lot of growth.”

Increased access had reduced emergency department visits and utilization in the markets Driscoll serves, which in turn has cut costs across the system.

Now, Mr. Hamon said the system opened a cardiology clinic in El Paso and is looking to open another in San Antonio. These clinics will be staffed by local physicians but provide specialty care through the flight program.

“Our goal is to grow where we see need — where we see underserved communities or the need for increased access — and go to that market,” he said.