Brown revives house calls, opens rural clinic for remote patients

In Dolores County, where the Colorado Rural Health Center describes the area as a hospital desert with no hospitals, getting care has long meant getting on the road. Dr. David Brown is trying to change that by reviving house calls for remote patients while building clinic access across southwest Colorado.

Brown and his wife, pediatrician Yvonne Naughton, opened San Juan Clinic in Silverton on Jan. 6, 2025, then opened a second location in Hermosa at Trimble Crossing in January 2026. The Hermosa clinic offers telehealth, primary care, pediatrics, labs, referrals, wound care and an on-site pharmacy, along with Brown’s sports medicine, internal medicine and weight-loss services. Brown has said, “Access is huge,” and he has argued that rural patients should not be confined to brick-and-mortar care.

The pressure on local families is clear in the county numbers. Dolores County’s population was estimated at 2,466 in July 2025, up from 2,326 in the 2020 Census, and 25.5% of residents were 65 or older. Another 7.0% of residents under 65 were uninsured. In a place that small and that old, a missed appointment can become a bigger problem quickly, especially when the nearest serious care is outside the county.

House calls once were ordinary medicine. A 2004 New England Journal of Medicine study found that house calls accounted for about 40% of doctor-patient visits in the 1930s, then dropped to less than 1% by the 1980s. Brown’s model reaches back to that older practice, but with modern backing from telehealth, lab work, referrals and an on-site pharmacy in Hermosa. Brown earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Boston University, a medical degree from Trinity College Dublin and completed an internal medicine residency at the University of Arizona.

San Juan County said the former Silverton Clinic closed effective Aug. 31, 2025, and that former patients could transfer care to Brown. The county also said Brown accepts Medicaid, Medicare, private insurance and self-pay, a key detail in a region where payer access often determines whether rural care is realistic or out of reach. For Dolores County residents living in a county without hospitals, Brown’s return to house calls is less a nostalgic flourish than a test of whether rural medicine can finally meet people where they are.