Hardcastles Career, Heart Still Center Around Children

The doctors and therapists at the UAMS/Arkansas Children’s Hospital Centers for Children in Lowell logged more than 17,000 patient visits in the centers’ last fiscal year.

“Our numbers are way exceeding what we had planned for,” said Angie Hardcastle, the centers’ medical services administrator.

When the facility opened in 2007, she said, it was predicted they would have 1,000 patient visits their first year.

Instead, they had 4,000.

That kind of growth “has just continued to be the case every year,” she said.

The centers had just opened when Hardcastle was named to the 2007 class of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s Forty Under 40.

When she started at the centers housed in a 40,000-SF building, they had 36 employees. They now have more than 100.

“It’s exciting to see what we can provide these kids,” she said. “This is important to them, for them and their families, to have the very best health care available to them in their area, their community.”

The centers initially offered treatment in four subspecialties, she said, and within a few months had nine more.

“Five years later, we have 19 subspecialty clinics, either based here at the facility or they fly up from Children’s Hospital,” Hardcastle said.

These cover “almost all the ‘ologies,’” she said, including gastroenterology, hematology/oncology, rheumatology, urology and genetics.

They’re still adding services, she said, and slowly adding each of the subspecialists there full time, based on patient need.

“Pretty much most of the services you can receive at Children’s Hospital on an outpatient basis, you can receive here,” Hardcastle said.

The idea for regional centers is to reduce the need for families to make frequent trips to Little Rock for care, she said. ACH recently opened a similar site in Jonesboro, and eventually one will open in the Texarkana area, she said.

The Lowell centers not only cover all of Northwest Arkansas, Hardcastle said, but reach Fort Smith and Harrison, and even into Missouri as far as Springfield and a few counties in Oklahoma.

“It’s tough for these families to make the trip to Little Rock,” she said. “A lot of the children are very medically fragile. It’s hard on the families financially, trying to take off work, and the kids have to take off of school.”

Also, some tests or procedures require the child to arrive the night before the appointment, which means getting a hotel room, she said.

The biggest challenge she’s faced in the last few years has been learning about all the subspecialties and what the doctors need to run their clinics efficiently and effectively. She said it’s exciting to learn about each new clinic.

“I’m always fascinated by what we can do to make each child’s life better,” she said.

Her wish list for the centers includes a surgical center for more outpatient procedures, a sleep study center and diagnostic services such as MRIs.

The Lowell facility also houses a general pediatric clinic that opened in December 2010 to provide diagnostics, treatment and follow-up care for children with general health problems. It also provides routine preventive medicine like immunizations and physical exams.

Other in-house resources include Schmieding Kids First, an early intervention program for children with special health care needs, and the Schmieding Developmental Center, which assesses and treats children with developmental delays or disabilities, or problems in school performance.

The continuity of care all these services make possible for the children is one of the things Hardcastle is most proud of.

“I want them to have a one-stop shop,” she said.

A UAMS employee since 2000, Hardcastle went to night classes at the University of Arkansas and earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 2004.

A personal goal is to earn an M.B.A. over the next couple of years. She’s hoping to return to her alma mater in the spring semester.

Long active as a children’s pastor at Trinity Fellowship Church in Fayetteville, she became an ordained minister in the past year.

“I love being around kids and teaching them,” Hardcastle said, “and I’m very fortunate to have it all the time, here at the center as well as in my personal time.”