Tue, Sep 15, 2026 at 12:00 AM

Significant improvements in healthcare lie ahead for Marshall County

The future is to embrace technology, ease access, train doctors locally

Marshall County residents had the unique opportunity to hear from a leader in local healthcare about his vision for making North Alabama hospitals serve communities better and more efficiently.

Dr. Paul Tabereaux is the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Quality Officer for HH Health System following a 17-year-career as a cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist at The Heart Center at Huntsville Hospital. The career change sprang from what he witnessed as a physician.

“I saw a profound need to provide better care for North Alabama,” he said. “I’m specifically suited for this. I felt a calling.”

Speaking at the annual Lake Guntersville Chamber of Commerce Healthcare Breakfast, Dr. Tabereaux, who was born in Sheffield, shared that he has spent a lot of time in Marshall County, thanks to his wife, Christina, who is from Boaz. He recognized many people in the crowd as former patients from The Heart Center.

Dr. Tabereaux attended medical school at UAB followed by an internship and residency at Yale University, where he remained as Chief Medical Resident. He completed fellowships in cardiovascular diseases and cardiac electrophysiology at UAB. He is triple board-certified in internal medicine, cardiology and cardiac electrophysiology. He joined The Heart Center in 2009 and began performing complex ablation procedures along with pacemaker and defibrillator implantations at Huntsville Hospital.

As the CMO for the North Alabama network of 15 hospitals, Dr. Tabereaux said his goal is to bring each facility to the same level of care.

“I want to do better,” he said. “I am the health system’s physician.”

Rural healthcare faces many challenges today. Dr. Tabereaux said immediate needs are centered around three main areas:

• Access – Specialty care often requires long drives to urban centers. Distance delays diagnosis and drives transfers.
• Workforce – Rural hospitals compete nationally for a shrinking pool of physicians. Recruiting doctors is difficult; retaining them is even harder.
• Complexity– Clinical knowledge, data volume and documentation demands are growing faster than staffing.
• One tool to assist in overcoming those challenges is technology, which takes many forms in hospitals. Dr. Tabereaux focused on four:
• Telemedicine– Connects patients with specialists without requiring a commute. Telemedicine will be implemented throughout the entire hospital system.
• “This is one way we will be able to provide more care locally,” he said.
• Teleradiology – Rapid transmission and reading of diagnostic studies. AI can over read an x-ray and point out anything that may have been missed.
• Clinical AI – AI augmented documentation will create notes for doctors instead of doctors spending a major amount of time generating notes for each patient.
• Digital Learning – Moves knowledge and clinical training across sites.

Recruiting physicians is a challenge for all hospitals but it is particularly difficult for rural systems. One key area Marshall Medical is focused on is cardiology, but constraints in the number of physicians trained each year compared to the number of jobs throughout the country make it challenging.

With no medical school located in North Alabama, the future is for hospitals to train their own doctors in residency programs.

“Our answer is to build our own pipeline,”Dr. Tabereaux said.

Marshall Medical Centers was awarded a Rural Residency Planning Grant to establish a program to train family doctors. MMC has submitted an application to begin a Family Medicine Residency Program for six residents per year. The residency clinic will be located on the South campus with rotations done at the North campus. The application determination will be made in October. If approved the new UAB Marshall Family Medicine Residency Program will welcome its inaugural intern class in July 2027. Physicians who train in a community are far more likely to remain in that community.