Emily Jack, MD: Making a Difference
Emily Jack has been part of Heppner Memorial Hospital for as long as she can remember. Growing up, she watched her mom work there as a nurse. The hospital grew to be more than where her mother worked, it was where Emily spent time getting to know the people who cared for her community.
Emily remembers, "I would come up here to this same clinic that I'm sitting in right now and hang out in the break room with all the nurses and everybody that worked up here." Growing up around that made her feel that going into healthcare was her calling.
Surrounded by family members and mentors in healthcare, Emily had opportunities to job shadow the people who cared for her neighbors and friends. Seeing firsthand what rural healthcare looked like gave her a clear goal from an early age: she wanted to become a primary care provider in the town where she grew up. She never wavered from that dream.
As she completed her undergraduate degree and continued into medical school at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), Emily found another community through AHEC. There, she met other students who shared her passion for rural medicine and began thinking about how to encourage more future healthcare providers to consider rural practice. They wanted to build on OHSU's existing rural rotations by creating opportunities for medical students to experience rural communities firsthand. Their hope was simple: if students could see what life in rural medicine was really like, they might choose it for themselves.
Working alongside Addie Pitter (her new best friend who she met through AHEC programming) and Nick West of Imbler, Emily worked with OHSU to create a program called Rural Medical Discovery. "[We] got to med school and saw that OHSU didn't have a ton of actual rural programming besides the rural rotations."
To fill that gap, their new program brought medical students to rural communities to tour local healthcare facilities, explore the area's recreation and culture, and meet the people who lived and worked there. But she wasn't done there. Later on, she partnered with NEOAHEC to create OHSU's Northeast Oregon Campus for Rural Health Education (CRHE), which brings students to La Grande, Enterprise, Baker City, and other locations to spend an extended period of time learning about rural medicine from our local providers.
After completing her medical training, Emily returned to Eastern Oregon and became part of the CRHE program herself as a guest speaker. She now serves as a preceptor, hosting OHSU students for clinical rotations lasting up to three months. During this time, she lets them take as much control as they are safely able.
While in Northeastern Oregon, students don't just learn medicine—they see Emily's family branding cattle, celebrating community holidays, and cheering on local kids as they grow up. In many ways, she is continuing the same tradition that shaped her as a child, when she watched her mother care for patients while building a life rooted in community. "It's just a clinic like any other clinic unless you get involved in the community."
Emily believes that in rural communities, meaningful change begins with the people who call those places home. If someone wants to see a difference in their hometown, they have to become part of the solution.
Throughout her life, she has watched Heppner Memorial Hospital evolve alongside the community it serves. She has seen dedicated healthcare professionals invest their time, energy, and compassion into caring for their neighbors, and she has seen how that commitment strengthens the entire community. In rural healthcare, one person's passion can create lasting change that reaches far beyond the walls of the hospital.
Now, in her two newly appointed roles as the Medical Director of the Clinic and Hospital and the Medical Director for Hospice and Home Health, Emily is excited to serve the town that raised her. She also plans to remain Morrow County's Public Health Officer, care for patients as she is able, and continue welcoming students to learn alongside her and her colleagues.
None of these responsibilities can be carried by one person alone. Emily is able to take on all these roles because she is surrounded by a team at Heppner Memorial Hospital that shares her commitment to providing exceptional care.
"Luckily, I just work with a lot of really talented people...We've all trained for different things. And so I really lean on everybody to work as a team. It's not all on me by any means.”
Together, the healthcare professionals of Heppner understand that although their hospital is the smallest in Oregon, the care it provides is irreplaceable.