About Dr. Sally Lambeth, MD

I am a board-certified internal medicine physician with more than 20 years of experience caring for adults in both hospital and outpatient settings.

I graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in 2006 and completed my Internal Medicine residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2010. I started as a hospitalist in Cary, NC and then at Atrium (I’ll always call it Baptist) from 2011 - 2018. Following that, I was an admitting hospitalist at Cone Health in Greensboro, NC. Around the time of COVID (with more time for soul-searching), I made the decision to pivot to primary care. I longed to have patient relationships that lasted over time, not just a hospital stay or my 7 day shift. I found renewed purpose and satisfaction as a PCP and have built countless relationships with patients over the last 6 years that truly have enriched my life. They also helped me realize that the current health care system is not set up for me to practice medicine the way I believe it should be practiced. I believe it should be person-centered, not metric-centered. I believe that a patient is a whole person with many organs, and also many facets of personality and character and life experiences that shape EVERY part of their health.

My particular focus in recent years has been on older adults and people with complex medical needs. But the variety of patients and medical practices I’ve worked with has given me an unique perspective on primary care. I’ve seen what happens when people arrive in the ED, when they are admitted to the hospital, what happens after they go home. I’ve seen what happens when several specialists are each (appropriately) focused on one part of a person’s health but no one seems to have enough time to step back and look at all of it as a whole.

That last part has become one of the things I am most passionate about, and it’s what I think the PCP relationship used to be, but has gotten lost along the way.

In addition, I genuinely enjoy the detective work of medicine. Going through the history, reviewing old records and test results, looking at the medication list (especially important and so frequently neglected), specialist recommendations, noticing patterns, and asking whether all of the pieces make sense together.

One of my closely-held beliefs is that patients deserve to understand their own medical care. Patients should not leave an appointment knowing only that a test was ordered or a medication changed, but not the reasoning behind it.

Increasingly, being a good physician means helping patients navigate the healthcare system itself.

Not long ago, I was checking in for an appointment at Labcorp. The process was entirely electronic: scan your driver’s license, enter information on a screen, and work your way through a series of prompts.

An older couple was waiting behind me. When I finished, they approached the machine and just stood there for a moment, looking bewildered. They hadn’t realized they were expected to check themselves in before anyone would see them.

So I offered to help.

I scanned their cards, entered their information, and walked them through the process. It took only a few minutes. But from their reaction, you would have thought I had performed a miracle.

I’ve thought about that little encounter many times because it captures something I see constantly in medicine.

Healthcare has become extraordinarily difficult to navigate. Patient portals, electronic check-ins, referrals, specialists, insurance requirements, medication lists, test results, things that are routine to those of us who work in healthcare can feel like an entirely different language to the person trying to get care.

And sometimes it seems that the more complicated your health becomes, the more the healthcare system asks you to manage it yourself.

That is one of the reasons I especially love caring for older adults. I don’t want my patients to feel as though they’ve been dropped into a complicated system and left to figure it out alone. I want to be the physician who knows the whole story, helps make sense of the pieces, and guides them through what comes next.