Next week when Mercy Iowa City officially merges with UI Health Care, it will be a sort of homecoming for both Craig Champion, MD, and John Kelley, MD, two internal medicine clinicians. The pair have been a part of Mercy Iowa City since their practice—Towncrest Internal Medicine—was acquired in 2015. 

Kelley describes joining Internal Medicine at Iowa as coming “full circle.” Kelley is the son of an optician who opened the first eyeglasses retail outlet inside University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics Main Campus and was also born in the same building. “I literally got my start here,” he said. He grew up in Iowa City, ran track at City High, and earned both his BA and his MD at the University of Iowa. Although ophthalmology was his original plan, after getting a few words of encouragement from Lewis January, MD during a lesson on reading EKGs, Kelley made the switch to internal medicine.  

A required tour in service in the Air Force sent Kelley to Texas and Oklahoma, but he found his way back to Iowa, first at a practice in Bloomfield, Iowa, where he began building long-term relationships with patients, some of whom he still sees today. At the urging of one of Towncrest’s founders, Chris Shrock, MD, Kelley returned to Iowa City and raised two children with his wife, a still-practicing chiropractor. 

Champion also spent time in the service about a decade earlier. After graduating from

Iowa’s College of Medicine, Champion served on a nuclear submarine in the Navy, which is where he came under the mentorship of a hematologist and found a love for internal medicine. After his tour, he came back to Iowa for residency and stayed on for a year as Chief Resident and then joined the faculty as an instructor. 

He says the patient population in those days was very different, that the hospital census was so low the college’s accreditation was at risk. “There weren’t enough patients. The university contracted with an ambulance service to travel all over the state to bring them here.” He described rows of DeSoto ambulances lined up outside General Hospital in the space that now separates the building from the Hardin Library for the Sciences. 

Champion said he loved the education side of working for Internal Medicine, teaching and mentoring, but circumstances led him into private practice. Over the years he still found plenty of time to teach, volunteering for decades at the Iowa City Free Medical Clinic, where many medical students still get their first real-world experience in community care.

Between practicing at Towncrest and at the Free Clinic, Champion also established himself in the community. He and his late wife, Connie, had eight children, and, among many community roles, she served on the Iowa City City Council for 16 years. In an interview with the Gazette on his 50th anniversary of practicing medicine, Champion talked about what his community has meant to him. “I like the variety and the contact with people,” Champion said. “That’s one of the nice parts of internal medicine, you don’t just see a patient and do whatever you do for them. It gets to be a relationship, you get to be friends with them.” One patient, he said, he has now been following for more than 50 years. After being seen by another physician for something else, that patient reported back to Champion, “He told me, ‘You must have had one heck of a good doctor!'” 

Although he expresses some concern about learning new systems at UI Health Care, Champion describes the relationships with the people he has known at Iowa and still knows as positive. Kelley echoes the sentiment and cites many names of leaders within the department and the Carver College of Medicine he says he is lucky to have known and learned from. Names like William Bean, James Clifton, Paul Strottman, Frank Abboud, Gerald DiBona, and Donald Brown are ones he cites as influential and always helpful when it came time for consultations.

Kelley is also looking forward to joining UI Health Care officially and getting access to the expertise of Iowa for his patients, some of whom—like Champion—he has been seeing for decades. “All the people I’ve met (at Iowa) have been very kind.”