KHIVA ROGERS – PRACTICE MANAGER, DESOTO, TEXAS
Our employees are all patient care champions, but some go the extra mile and we want to give them the recognition they deserve. They embody the PPOA values known as S.I.T.E. – Safety, Integrity, Teamwork, Empathy – which informs our service to patients and the community through high quality health care.
If there is one thing Khiva Rogers has learned at the PPOA Desoto, Texas clinic she manages it’s that patients deserve compassion and respect – no matter how challenging they might be. And it’s something she instills in her staff.
“People in pain are not their normal selves. They’re hurting,” she says. “I treat them like I’d want my grandparents to be treated.”
That attitude comes easily to this mother of three grown sons and grandmother of four.
“My mother was a private duty nurse. She helped her patients and her patients fell in love with her,” Rogers recalls. “She always did above what was expected. I followed her into medicine and I try to follow her example every day.”
Rogers is known to keep a bucket of frozen water bottles outside the entrance for patients to sip on during scorching Texas summers. Her regional manager, Terica Cox, recalls one incident that typifies Rogers’s heart for patient care.
“One time there was a patient who was not acting normal; he was disoriented,” Cox recalls. “We checked on him. Khiva sat with him and took him into a room. She asked him, ‘Have you eaten today?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you diabetic?’ ‘Yes.’ She went to the kitchen and gave this man her lunch. That’s outstanding.”
A native of Dallas, Rogers joined the U.S. Army after high school, which took her around the world. Her job: mortuary assistant in South Korea. It was her duty to identify the remains of fallen soldiers – a task both grisly and honorable. Still, the universe kept coaxing her into her mother’s footsteps.
Being stationed separately from her husband, Randall, a fellow soldier, was also difficult, especially as their family grew. They returned to the States, and Khiva Rogers enrolled in Lakeland Medical Academy (now Herzing University) in Minneapolis, Minn. She earned her medical assistant certificate and worked at the University of Minnesota’s hospital neurology department.
After five years, the family moved back to Dallas, where Rogers earned an A.S. in Science at Richland College and went to work as the office manager at the Ashland Ambulatory Surgery Center at the University of Texas.
She came to PPOA in 2016, first in the North Dallas clinic, moving into her current role in 2018. In addition to providing compassionate care, Rogers also believes in educating patients.
“I try to inform them at all levels; not only about their condition but about navigating paperwork,” she says. “What a deductible is, what a prior authorization is. It’s not easy for someone in the profession to understand it, so how can we expect patients to get it? I will pull them to the side and explain it. I’ll even write it down if they need it.”
Her willingness to go the extra mile ever day in her job makes Khiva Rogers a PPOA Patient Care Champion.
