Picture this. It’s a Tuesday morning and you’ve got three appointments to coordinate: your six-year-old’s well-child visit, your own annual checkup, and a follow-up for your teenager who’s been managing a chronic condition since grade school. Three different offices. Three different portals to log into. Three separate doctors who’ve never actually talked to each other.
Now imagine all of that happening in one place, with one doctor who already knows your family.
That’s not a fantasy. It’s what Monument Health’s Med-Peds clinic is quietly doing right now in Rapid City.
Trained in Both, Certified in Both
Dr. Marissa Copas Weaver and Dr. Eammon Grosek are both Med-Peds physicians, which means they completed a four-year residency training in both internal medicine and pediatrics. Not a little of each. All of both. They sit for separate board exams in each specialty and are held to the same standards as doctors who only trained in one. The result is a physician who can see your newborn, your college kid home for the summer, and you, all under the same roof.
Dr. Copas Weaver came to it the way a lot of people stumble into the right thing. She went into medical school thinking she’d do family medicine. Then she fell in love with pediatrics. Then she really connected with internal medicine. And she just… couldn’t pick.
“I couldn’t pick between either specialty,” she said, “and then I realized that with a Med-Peds residency, I’d be specialized in both. That really sold it for me.”
The Gap Nobody Talks About
The part most people don’t think about until they’re in the middle of it is what happens at the transition point. A kid who’s had Type 1 diabetes since age ten has a whole pediatric team that knows their history, their rhythms, what works for them. Then they turn 18 and get handed off to an adult doctor who’s starting from scratch. That handoff is often where things get lost.
A Med-Peds physician doesn’t have that gap. They’ve been there the whole way.
“We have that pediatric background, we’re used to the management,” Dr. Copas Weaver said, “and then we kind of have a leg up on what screenings we need to do now that they’re an adult.”
Dr. Grosek pointed to cystic fibrosis and congenital heart disease too. As medicine keeps advancing, more patients with conditions that once shortened lifespans are living full adult lives. Having a doctor who’s followed you from childhood isn’t just convenient. It’s genuinely better care.
Knowing the Family Changes Everything
There’s also something harder to quantify but easy to feel. When your doctor already knows the parents, the well-child visit changes. Dr. Copas Weaver put it this way: when a worried mom or dad sits across from her, she’s not doing a cold read of a stranger’s anxiety. She already knows their medical history. She already knows what their baseline looks like.
“I can ease the parent’s anxiety because I’m not just addressing the child,” she said. “I’m addressing them, too.”
Dr. Grosek sees the same thing from a different angle. So much of what shows up in pediatrics is really about what’s happening at home. Knowing the whole family means you’re seeing the whole picture, not just the piece that walked through the door.
Why Having a Primary Care Doctor Matters
Both doctors were also pretty clear about something else: if you don’t have a primary care physician right now, you should. Not because something’s wrong, but because it’s a lot easier to figure out if something’s wrong when someone already knows what “normal” looks like for you.
“Sometimes it’s very reassuring to know that you have someone who knows you,” Dr. Copas Weaver said. “So if something weird does come up, you can go to them and they can tell you, ‘that’s nothing,’ or, ‘yes, that’s actually something.'”
And if the fit isn’t right? Both of them said the same thing: switch doctors. No hard feelings. What matters is that you find someone you’ll actually talk to.
Monument Health’s Med-Peds clinic is currently accepting new patients. You can find Dr. Copas Weaver and Dr. Grosek on the Monument Health website, read their bios, and get a feel for who they are before you ever pick up the phone.
Because the best doctor you’ll ever have is the one who already knows your whole story.
Monument Health’s Med-Peds clinic is located in Rapid City. New patients can find provider information and schedule appointments at monument.health.
