A Letter From Our Founder: Why We Built Roxboro Clinic

Before Roxboro Clinic existed, it was a realization forming in the emergency department. Dr. Marshall Ross spent years treating patients in crisis — heart attacks, strokes, diabetic complications — and kept noticing the same pattern: the chart told a story that had been building for years, often long before the patient ever landed in front of him.

Roxboro Clinic was built to fill that gap: long-term, proactive primary care that keeps people well over decades. This is something the public system, for all its strengths in a crisis, was never designed or adequately resourced to provide at an optimal level. We sat down with Co-Founder and Medical Director Dr. Marshall Ross to talk about where that idea came from, why now was the right time to build it, and what he hopes it means for patients over the years ahead.

Meet Dr. Marshall Ross, Co-Founder and Medical Director of Roxboro Clinic.

What moments or patterns made you feel, "I have to build something different"?

Dr. Ross: "I spent years in the emergency department watching the same thing happen on repeat. Someone would come in with a heart attack, a stroke, a diabetic complication, and a lot of the time, the chart told the real story: this had been building for years. High blood pressure that was suboptimally managed, undetected risk factors that might have been identified and treated earlier. Lifestyle interventions that were not implemented or clinically managed and followed. A patient who kept meaning to see someone about their weight or their blood sugar but never had the time, or the access, or a doctor and a supporting team who had the bandwidth to actually dig into it and make a difference.

It wasn't one dramatic moment. It was hundreds of smaller ones, all pointing to the same conclusion: we are exceptional at treating emergencies and structurally under-resourced to prevent them. The ER is built to react fast, not to know you. I saw an enormous need that patients were struggling to access, so I decided to do what I could to build what patients really need."

Why was now the right time to create this clinic, and what feels most different about practicing medicine inside Roxboro today?

Dr. Ross: "Honestly, part of it is just pattern recognition after enough years in the system — you start to see the same gap over and over, and eventually you can't unsee it. I'm not trying to replace the public system. I work in it, I believe in it, and I've spent most of my career inside it.

What I'm trying to do is build the piece and provide the resources the public system was never designed to have: the slow, continuous relationship where someone actually knows your history and is watching for patterns over years, not minutes. What's different day to day at Roxboro is time. In the ER you get minutes. Family doctors are rushed to see patients and don't have the surrounding team of healthcare practitioners to help patients make real change. Here, our doctors get to sit with someone's full picture, follow their labs over years instead of one visit, and actually adjust course before something becomes an emergency instead of after."

What does that look like for a member over the course of a year?

Dr. Ross: "Over a year, it looks less like "appointments" and more like a running conversation. It starts with a real baseline, that means comprehensive bloodwork, body composition analysis, a proper fitness assessment through our partnership with the University of Calgary's exercise physiology lab and a detailed assessment of their diet and metabolic health.

Members have access to their care team when they need it, they enjoy convenient care, labs and ECGs at their home and quick follow up for new issues as they arise. Members have ongoing follow up with experts in lifestyle interventions and follow up to track their progress using data, not subjective impressions. From there it's ongoing: regular check-ins with your family physician, with a dietitian, with an exercise physiologist, all of it coordinated instead of siloed. What I hope members notice is that nothing falls through the cracks. If a specialist is needed, we're the ones chasing that referral down, not them. If a lab result shifts, someone catches it before it becomes a symptom. Our members feel like there's a team actually paying attention to their whole health, proactively intervening and not just responding when something goes wrong."

If you imagine a Roxboro member ten years from now looking back, what would you hope they say?

Dr. Ross: "Ten years from now, I'd want a member to say that Roxboro caught something early that would have otherwise become a crisis, a cardiac risk, a metabolic issue, something that got addressed years before it would have landed them in my old emergency department. I want our members to feel healthier ten years down the line than they do today.

But just as much, I'd want them to say that healthcare stopped feeling like something that only showed up when they were already in trouble. That they had a team who knew their history, who they trusted, and who helped them make better decisions along the way.

If Roxboro members spend a decade with fewer emergencies and more clarity about their own health, that's the whole point of building this."

Roxboro Clinic is a membership-based family medicine practice in Calgary founded by Dr. Marshall Ross.