FARMINGTON – Almost everybody at some point in their life will have need of a medical specialist. For folks in rural areas like Leonard Bornstein of New Sharon, that usually means a drive to the closest city for each checkup.

Bornstein was sitting in a second-floor exam room at Franklin Memorial Hospital Monday, waiting for his Lewiston-based cardiologist, Dr. Robert Bender, to appear. While he his wife will still be driving to see other specialists and to have tests done, Bornstein thinks his life will be easier now that Bender has taken a part-time post at FMH’s outpatient cardiology clinic.

“It’s easier on my wife,” he said Monday. “My wife has been doing the driving.”

Recent New Jersey transplant Bender is one of a number of specialists from across the state who’ve swapped driving hours with their patients, coming to Franklin County a few times a month so their patients don’t have to make the drive to their offices in the cities.

“We cover a geographical area the size of Rhode Island at this hospital,” FMH outpatient and oncology Manager Taffy Davis said. “All the way from here (Farmington) to the Canadian border, this is where you come.”

If folks had to drive all the way to Maine Medical Center in Portland or Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, they’d probably end up paying for a hotel room, in addition to hefty gas prices and the day off.

Bender moved to Maine planning to do something to help the community, he said. The services offered by people like him are part of what has made FMH great over the years, FMH president Richard Batt said last week.

“Here in Farmington, we have some of the best doctors in the state,” Batt said. “People couldn’t find better specialists anywhere, because we went out and brought the best doctors to Farmington.”

While some services – like treatments in a cardiology catheter lab aren’t offered at FMH, many are, including a top-of-the-line CAT scan machine.

The outpatient clinic and high-end equipment has been good for the hospital, Batt said. “More than half of the total business of this hospital (now) is outpatient services,” he said. “It was about 10 to 20 percent, and now about 60 percent of all our business is outpatient business.”

Mostly, the change has been good for folks in Franklin County, Davis said.

“It keeps them from having to travel to Lewiston or Portland,” she said. “They (the traveling specialists) basically bring their office here – so during snowstorms people aren’t traveling.”

“It’s all about keeping our patients in the community,” Davis said.

The clinic is also one of the reasons FMH has won so many national awards in recent years, Batt said. “You would be hard pressed in the city of Boston to get better care than you get here,” he said. “And it’s a lot more simpler, and a lot more friendlier, and a lot more easier to access.”