We started because eleven minutes is not a visit

Dr. Priya Raghunathan spent nine years in a hospital-owned group in central Iowa watching the well-child visit get shorter. By the end it was eleven minutes, which is enough time to plot a growth chart and give a vaccine, and not enough to notice that a mother is not sleeping or that a toddler has stopped pointing at things.

She opened Little Sprouts in 2014 with four exam rooms and a schedule template that nobody in the building was allowed to override. Thirty minutes for a well visit. Forty-five at twelve and eighteen months, because those are the two densest visits in childhood. Newborn slots held open every morning so that no baby discharged on a Friday waits until Tuesday for a weight check.

Eleven years on we are three clinics and six clinicians, and the schedule template has not changed. What has changed is what we can do inside it: spirometry, an IBCLC four days a week, extended developmental evaluation slots, a sensory-friendly appointment anyone can ask for, and a nurse line staffed by our own pediatric nurses at 2am.

We are not the biggest pediatric practice in Des Moines and we are not trying to be. We are trying to be the one where your child's clinician recognises them in the waiting room.