DHR expands Starr County medical campus with new specialists and rural residency program

Dr. Alberto ‘Beto’ Gutierrez remembers being 8 years old in his hometown of Rio Grande City when his father got sick in the late 1940s.

“We had no specialists here — not even in McAllen. My dad had an ulcer, and we had to go to San Antonio for treatment,” Gutierrez said. 

Now, after 54 years as a family medicine physician — many of which were spent working for Doctors Hospital at Renaissance in Edinburg — he’s seen more than 1 million patients. 

Gutierrez is also the former medical director of the Hope Family Health Center, a nonprofit clinic that serves uninsured patients that has long been supported by a charity fishing tournament DHR Health runs. 

Gutierrez was honored for his service to the community on Thursday as DHR celebrated the expansion of its Starr County medical campus, which sits across the road from Starr County Memorial Hospital. 

“Now we have nine specialties coming here to the community. I never thought this would happen,” Gutierrez said. “This is a big achievement for our community.”

The specialties include bariatric surgery, cardiology, colorectal surgery, gastroenterology, medical oncology and hematology, pulmonology, urology, vascular surgery, and diabetes and endocrinology. 

For the past decade, DHR Health has been investing in its footprint in Starr County. 

Its campus includes a 12,375-square-foot medical laboratory that provides advanced diagnostic testing; an 11,766-square-foot cardiology and multi-specialty resident training clinic; a 12,893-square-foot clinical research center for clinical trials; a 17,526-square-foot primary care graduate medical education center; and a clinic focused on training physicians in family medicine, internal medicine, and psychiatry.

The campus was supported by a seed grant in 2022, which provided $16.7 million from the Texas Department of State Health Services through the federal American Rescue Plan Act. 

“This residency program, which we are trying to start, we are hoping that people will come here, fall in love, and become part of the community, and the next generation of primary care physicians will be here,” Dr. Manish Singh, CEO of DHR Health, told the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal. 

This summer, DHR expects to open its family medical center and begin its residency training program for rural healthcare with a focus on obstetrics, as there are only two obstetricians in Starr County. 

The residency program is overseen by Dr. Naomi D’Acolatse, its director, whose purview now includes the program in Edinburg and Rio Grande City.

The residency program in Starr County is supported by a federal Health and Human Services Grant worth $749,356 during its first three years. 

“We are making a long-term commitment to the future of Starr County,” D’Acolatse said.

Each year, two residents will be located in Starr County, with at least six over a three-year period. The goal is to expand that talent pipeline to four residents each year. 

The family medicine center, which will serve patients from pediatrics through geriatrics, has been in the works for more than a decade. It’s modeled after DHR’s family medicine center in Edinburg. 

The doctor-to-patient ratio in Rio Grande City is roughly one doctor to 2,300 patients. 

“Now that we have the right faculty available and directors and the support financially from the state as well as locally, we are able to move forward with this project,” D’Acolatse said. “We can care for the entire family, as well as have mental health integration care right here in our clinic.

Having all of that under one roof is really going to eliminate the challenges of transportation barriers.”