From PeaceHealth's ER to your prevention plan.

How a senior ED physician ended up running a concierge primary care practice.

Dr. Scribner trained at Georgetown University Hospital and completed his Emergency Medicine residency at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth — one of the country's high-volume EM training programs. He moved to Bellingham to practice at PeaceHealth St. Joseph, where he spent the better part of two decades caring for patients across the full clinical spectrum: trauma, cardiac events, sepsis, the routine and the rare. He rose to Medical Director of the emergency department and remains an attending physician there today.

Twenty years in the ED teaches you a particular kind of pattern recognition — what gets missed in fifteen-minute primary care visits, what shows up downstream when symptoms get dismissed, what lab values ‘in the normal range’ actually predict. It also teaches you, eventually, what it would look like to do this differently. To run the workup the first time. To take symptoms seriously. To have the time the conversation actually requires.

Functional medicine gave him the framework. The A4M Fellowship in Anti-Aging, Functional and Metabolic Medicine and the ABAARM board certification added the structured curriculum for treating what conventional primary care doesn't have time to investigate — hormonal optimization, longevity-aware preventive care, advanced lab interpretation, the protocols that sit between ‘your labs are normal’ and ‘you don’t feel normal.’ Combined with two decades of acute-care judgment, the result is a practice that takes both ends of medicine seriously — emergency-medicine pattern recognition and functional-medicine root-cause investigation. The clinical disciplines have their own pages — see longevity medicine and functional medicine.

Mt. Baker Medical is the practice that came out of that. A direct-pay concierge primary care membership for patients who want the time, the workup, and the relationship that insurance-based primary care can't make room for. Same physician for every visit. Hour-long appointments. Direct phone and message access. Built in Bellingham, by a physician who has spent his career here, for patients who want their primary care from a doctor who already knows the local healthcare system inside out.

Charlie Platt runs the business so Dr. Scribner can run the medicine.

Charlie is the Co-Founder and Operating Partner of Mt. Baker Medical. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate and former Naval officer, he later earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. At Mt. Baker Medical he leads operations, growth, and the systems and infrastructure that keep concierge care running the way it should — quietly, reliably, and entirely in service of the physician-patient relationship.

The split is intentional. Concierge medicine doesn't work if the doctor is also running payroll, vendor contracts, scheduling, and marketing. Dr. Scribner reads every lab and writes every protocol because the operational layer is handled. That's what Charlie's role is for.

How Dr. Scribner thinks about the practice.

Practicing inside the Mason Block, since 1890.

Mt. Baker Medical sits in Suite 308 of Sycamore Square — the 1890 Mason Block, on the National Register of Historic Places, anchoring the Fairhaven Historic District in south Bellingham.

The building is intentional. We do work that takes time, in a building built to last.

What patients ask about Dr. Scribner.