ABOVE: Ashley Brown seen inside her new exam room in the former Lakeview building in Fairmont. Brown will be able to do disability exams on veterans sent to her by the VA.

FAIRMONT– Ashley Brown, a certified nurse practitioner, is utilizing space in the former Lakeview Methodist Health Care Center building in Fairmont to do veteran disability exams through her business, Midwest Valley Honorable Healthcare. She will see her first patients next week.

Brown is new to the area, but her husband Kory is from Granada and graduated from Fairmont High School. The couple recently relocated to the area.

She has a background in healthcare and spent time as a nurse in the emergency departments in a few different Twin Cities hospitals. She’s been a nurse practitioner now for two years and has worked specifically in geriatrics in the home.

“Initially I was working with chronic care management and now I’m more on the preventative side,” Brown said.

She plans to continue to do this work while seeing veterans at Lakeview through her other business, Midwest Valley Home Care, which is licensed and provides non-medical home care for seniors and veterans in Martin County and beyond.

Brown explained that her passion for providing care to veterans took off because her husband had been serving full-time with the Air National Guard Base in Minneapolis.

She was reached out to by a vendor of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to do compensation and pension exams.

The exams are often required when a veteran files a claim with the VA regional office.

The regional offices in turn, depending on the condition the veteran is filing for and the medical evidence that’s already been submitted, will schedule a compensation or pension exam for those who have filed a claim.

Brown has been studying with the VA on the Disability Benefit Questions (DBQ) and with the training she’ll be able to conduct some of the examinations. She will then compile her opinions and submit them to the VA regional office as part of the evidence of the veteran’s claim.

To get started, Brown needed a clinic space to examine patients that the network sends to her to be examined because they need a disability rating.

“I looked at a few places and then had the privilege of speaking with Deb (Barnes at Lakeview) and it seems like our missions totally aligned. We talked about how we can work together in a partnership and got the ball rolling.”

Barnes said it was a coincident that Brown’s inquiry came while Lakeview was working on entering into an agreement with the VA to accept eligible veterans with VA coverage for long-term care.

“We’re serving veterans in more than one way,” Barnes said.

Brown has an exam room set up inside the former Lakeview building where she’ll do the disability exams.

She is now working with two vendors that are contracted with the VA for the compensation and pension work. Her schedule for the rest of the month has been put together. To start she will be seeing veterans at Lakeview on Tuesdays and Thursdays to make sure this is a good location.

“They’re drawing out of Sioux Falls, the twin Cities and the Rochester area. Veterans will have to travel awhile to get to the Fairmont area but once the word is out that there’s a new location for veterans to work through their claims, they hope it will grow. My goal is to make this Monday through Friday,” Brown said.

While she’s just getting started, Brown has a long-term goal of becoming a VA care in community primary care provider.

“With my husband being in the military himself, our passion is to serve where there’s need. We really want to honor his hometown and this community,” she said.

Brown said she’s begun networking with other local healthcare providers to see if there’s a possibility of becoming a community provider.

While happy to have her, Barnes said Lakeview’s only real involvement in this is leasing space to Brown.

“If we can help meet a need, we do it and we always have,” Barnes said.