📍 909A Seton Dr, Cumberland, MD 21502, United States ✉️ info@highlandhealthyliving.com
Medicare wellness visits, medication review, fall prevention, and chronic care built around how aging actually changes the body. Accepting new senior patients.
Aging changes what good medical care looks like. Medications interact differently. Symptoms present differently. And the goal shifts from fixing one thing to keeping the whole system steady enough that you can keep living the way you want to.
Highland Healthy Living provides senior-focused primary care at 909 A Seton Drive in Cumberland, MD. We're accepting new senior patients, we take Medicare, and we're rated 4.9 stars across 35 reviews.
A geriatric physician is a provider who focuses on the health of older adults. The specialty exists because medicine that works well for a forty-year-old doesn't always work well for an eighty-year-old, and pretending otherwise causes real harm.
Take medication. A drug dose that's routine at fifty can be too much at eighty, because kidney function drops, body composition changes, and drugs hang around longer than they used to. Now stack six or seven prescriptions on top of each other, each one prescribed by somebody solving a different problem, and you get interactions nobody planned for. A lot of what gets blamed on aging, the fatigue, the dizziness, the fog, the falls, turns out to be the medication list.
Geriatric care means somebody's finally looking at the whole list.
Most of the job is looking at the full picture rather than one organ at a time. That means reviewing every medication you're on and asking whether you still need it, which is a question that gets asked far too rarely. It means watching for the things that quietly steal independence, like balance problems, hearing loss, vision changes, and memory shifts. And it means managing chronic conditions with an eye on how they interact rather than optimizing each number in isolation.
It also means talking about what you actually want. An eighty-five-year-old who wants to keep gardening and an eighty-five-year-old who wants to keep traveling need different plans, and neither one is well served by a provider who's just chasing lab values.
Our senior and geriatric care covers the things that matter most as people get older:
Medication review is honestly where we find the most fixable problems. A surprising number of people are still taking something they were started on years ago for a reason nobody remembers.
The usual suspects show up here, but they behave differently and they rarely show up alone:
That last one deserves a word. Depression in older adults gets missed constantly, partly because everyone assumes low mood is just part of getting old. It isn't, and it's treatable. If somebody you love has gone quiet and withdrawn and you've been telling yourself it's just age, it's worth a conversation.
If you're managing several of these at once, our chronic disease management program is built for exactly that.
There's no magic number, and anyone who gives you one is oversimplifying.
Age sixty-five is the rough marker people use, mostly because that's when Medicare starts. But plenty of sixty-five-year-olds are healthy, active, on one medication, and don't need anything different from what they've always had. Meanwhile some seventy-five-year-olds have needed geriatric-focused care for years.
The better question isn't how old you are. It's whether any of this describes you:
If two or more of those apply, it's time, whatever the number on your birth certificate says.
Family members are welcome at appointments, and honestly we'd encourage it. A second set of ears helps, especially when there's a lot to keep track of. Call (240) 880-3220 and we'll talk it through.
Older patients get rushed more than anyone, and it does more damage to them than to anyone else. A complicated medication list and a shifting set of symptoms can't be untangled in twelve minutes.
April Dawson, MSN, APRN, FNP-C, is a board-certified family nurse practitioner with more than 25 years of clinical experience, and she built this practice specifically so visits wouldn't have to be that short. Patients say the same thing in review after review. She listens, she explains, and she doesn't make you feel like you're taking up her time. That's the whole reason we're at 4.9 stars.
We accept Medicare, along with Medicaid and most private insurance plans. Medicare Annual Wellness Visits are covered, so there's no reason to skip them, and plenty of people do.
We're currently accepting new senior patients. If you're not sure whether your particular plan or supplement is in network, call (240) 880-3220 and the front desk will check before you book. Our new patient page covers what to bring and what the first visit looks like.
A provider who focuses on the health of older adults, with particular attention to medication safety, chronic conditions that overlap, mobility, memory, and independence.
Reviews and simplifies medications, manages multiple chronic conditions together rather than separately, screens for fall risk and memory changes, handles Medicare wellness visits, and coordinates care across specialists.
There's no fixed age. Sixty-five is a common starting point, but what matters more is whether you're on several medications, managing multiple conditions, or dealing with falls or memory changes. If two or more of those apply, it's worth having the conversation.
A geriatric-focused provider can absolutely be your primary care provider. The difference is emphasis. The care is built around the specific ways aging changes how the body handles illness and medication.
Yes. We accept Medicare, and Medicare Annual Wellness Visits are covered.
Yes, and we'd recommend it. An extra set of ears is genuinely useful.
Your senior care connects to the rest of the practice: senior and geriatric services, general primary care, adult internal medicine, and telehealth visits for when getting to the office is hard.
Highland Healthy Living is at 909 A Seton Drive, Cumberland, MD 21502. We're open Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and we're an easy drive from La Vale, Ridgeley, and across Allegany County. Parking is close to the door.
If you're looking for a geriatric physician in Cumberland, MD, or you're helping a parent find one, we're accepting new senior patients now.
Highland Healthy Living provides senior-focused primary care in Cumberland, MD. Medicare accepted. Now welcoming new senior patients.