Comprehensive Personalized Healthcare

Wellness and Lifestyle Management

At Open Water Medical, we offer high-quality primary care services to help patients no matter where they are in life. We are a family physician office with five locations in Beaufort, Morehead City, Goldsboro, Jacksonville, and Newport, NC. Our different sites provide immediate access to healthcare for your convenience.

We have recognized that the current American lifestyle is killing us all. Bad decisions with our supersized diet, smoking and excessive habits that lead to addiction are driving us to premature death. We focus on each individual and their risk of losing the battle with illness and becoming a sick care statistic. We emphasize healthy choices and modification of risk factors to keep you as healthy as possible and believe that another pill isn’t always the right choice with reversible conditions like diabetes and hypertension. Our practice is focused on you and your needs and the best recommendations we can provide in partnership with you to keep you active and healthy.

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Beaufort Location

Morehead City Location

Goldsboro Location

Jacksonville Location

Newport Location

Benefits

Annual Executive Panel
Minor “In practice” Surgery (excluding pathology costs)
In-office EKG
Joint Injections (Sports Medicine)
-50% Discount on Labs through Mako Labs
Annual Wellness Visit
Routine GYN Care (Excludes pathology for Pap smears)

New Direct Personal Care Enrollment

Proudly serving the Crystal Coast community.

For over 30 years, we have dedicated our practice to providing optimized healthcare to patients over the age of 18 throughout the Crystal Coast community. Between our advanced technologies and comprehensive care methods, we deliver the most detailed and thorough healthcare possible.

Along with our five convenient locations in Beaufort, Morehead City, Goldsboro, Jacksonville, and Newport, NC, we provide flexible hours to accommodate our patients’ schedules. For payment options, we accept Medicare and Medicaid for your convenience.

Services we provide.

Urgent Care Visits

People get sick quickly and need care and attention that day. We offer same day appointments with our providers to be sure you get the care you need from providers you trust. Telehealth appointments are available daily as well for those days that getting to the office isn’t in the plans.

Physicals

Our medical professionals work to deliver exceptional physical exams that support your best possible quality of life. We will assess your current lifestyle and look for areas to improve. Physicals allow us to identify medical issues in the earliest stages, when treatment may be most effective. We will review all of your current and recent medications to determine if your needs are being met in the best possible way. In some cases, a different medication may offer a better treatment path.

Remote Patient Monitoring

We promote RPM to allow self-monitoring of conditions by patients with our oversight. The best condition is a controlled condition that is measured daily and allows for intervention if not meeting our recommendations. We use RPM for diabetes care, congestive heart failure, and hypertension, to name a few.
Our job is to utilize resources like this that keep our patients healthy and away from the sick care system.

In-Office Lab Testing

We offer Hgb A1c, Covid-19, strep, flu, and urinalysis testing to promote rapid and accurate diagnosis support. We believe rapid recovery begins with rapid testing when time is critical.

H1AC Testing

An H1AC test measures the amount of blood sugar attached to hemoglobin. We can view the average amount of glucose attached to hemoglobin over the past three months. If your levels are high, it may be a sign of diabetes, leading to heart disease, kidney disease, and more. You may need an H1AC test if you have increased thirst, increased urination, history of heart disease or high blood pressure, blurred vision, or fatigue. After testing, you may have slight pain or bruising at the spot where we put in the needle, but most symptoms go away quickly. If you have diabetes, the American Diabetes Association recommends keeping your HbA1c levels below 7%. Depending on your overall health, age, weight, and other factors, we will figure out the proper recommendations for you.

Weight Loss Counseling

We offer a judgment-free environment where we access individual factors and develop a plan for weight loss. The right choice may be few or many, but they all begin with caloric restriction and portion control. The interventions might be medication or simply a referral to cognitive behavioral programs we recommend in your best choice.

Smoking Cessation Counseling

Smoking is one of the most dangerous things you can do to your overall health and wellness. This addiction can increase your risk of heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, and much more. Our team can help develop a medically approved plan to help you succeed with smoke cessation. Finding the proper treatment may take some trial and error, but we will guide you towards the options best suited for your needs. Our professional support and advice will be there for you when you need it the most.

COVID-19 Rapid Testing

We also offer COVID-19 rapid testing so you can have your results immediately. Throughout the pandemic, we have worked diligently to provide the essential resources you need to stay protected and healthy.

COVID-19 Vaccines

We are a rapid identification counseling and treatment center offering in-car testing for suspected cases of COVID-19 or flu. We have upgraded our testing in all locations to provide the rapid diagnosis option while early treatment is still an option.

Addiction Recovery Services

We offer the Vivitrol medication-assisted therapy program to our community for individuals with opioid and alcohol addiction issues. We believe that MAT doesn’t have to keep you addicted and tied up in the healthcare system on a daily basis. We have seen the poor results of traditional MAT and the improved results we see with Vivitrol use and a recovery program. We provide a cooperative effort with other providers to make your recovery last long and well without maintaining the addiction.

Wound Care

We offer wound care services with advanced dressings and care for our patients. From Unna boots to burn care, we provide a large spectrum of care and management for wounds. In the Beaufort office, we offer the Dermapace Low-Intensity shockwave treatments for diabetic foot and leg ulcers, along with its rapid results and healing properties for limbs that are in danger should the wounds progress.

Lifestyle Coaching

Whether the problem is obesity, smoking cessation, or other negative behaviors, we will work with you to address and resolve these threats to your longevity. We believe that individualized plans utilizing health professions as needed will lead to a better solution sooner rather than later.

Specialized Diagnosis Services

In our partnership with Mako Labs and Microgen, we provide advanced PSE and next-generation sequencing to identify and clarify treatment options for many conditions such as non-healing wounds, recurrent UTIs, and nail infections that don’t involve toxic treatments that can cause much harm.

Other Services

We provide in-office ECG, joint injections, skin biopsies, and cryosurgery to expand our efforts to serve you. We are especially excited to offer tendinopathy treatments using the Demapace system and LIST. This emerging noninvasive therapy offers a needle-free approach to rapid diagnosis and intervention for conditions such as Achilles tendonitis and tennis elbow. While not covered by insurance, these treatments provide excellent results and an alternative path to healing from traditional invasive and painful options.

family physicians | Beaufort, Morehead City, Goldsboro NC

family practice | Open Water Medical PA, Beaufort, Morehead City, Goldsboro NC

healthcare for families | Beaufort, Morehead City, Goldsboro NC

urgent care center | Beaufort, Morehead City, Goldsboro NC

Who we are.

We started Open Water Medical in 1988 at our first location in Beaufort, NC. When Dr. Kerry Willis came back to Beaufort over 30 years ago, he wanted to ensure that rural North Carolina and the Down East community had quality primary care.

Since then, Dr. Willis has built on that goal and expanded his team of care providers throughout the years. We opened the Morehead City location in 2015 and then Goldsboro in 2019. After that, we added two more locations: Jacksonville and Newport in 2022. Today, there are now five locations available to help residents throughout the Crystal Coast community.

Our team is proud to provide comprehensive care and individualized treatment to patients of all ages. With extensive training and years of experience, we can offer the thorough and careful treatment your family needs.

Jack Orton, RN

William “Jack” Orton became an East Tennessee State University registered nurse in 1978. He attended Wake Forest University School of Medicine and became a physician assistant in 1990. Jack has 14 years of military service. He has also worked in family practice since 1995, being a chief physician assistant in Cardiothoracic surgery from 1990 to 1995.

Terri Turner, RN, FNP-BC

Terri is originally from Texas, where she was born and lived her whole life until moving to North Carolina 1.5 years ago. Her reasons for moving consist of “wanting to have an adventure” and “Dallas/Fort Worth was getting too big and noisy.”

She has been a Nurse Practitioner for over ten years and an ICU/Stepdown nurse for over 30 years. Her career as an NP consisted of doing house calls for the most fragile patients with multiple comorbid diseases. Her treatment philosophy is based on Rosemarie Rizzo Parse’s philosophy of Human Becoming, which guides nurses to focus on the quality of life from each person’s perspective as the goal of nursing. The theory relies on partnering with a patient on healthy goals and prevention versus making the patient passive in their course of treatment.

Her current interests include taking a Reiki course (to assist with pain management for her patients), reading educational improvement books, and gardening. Currently, she has two German Shepherds and two cats, who think she babbles way too much and needs to give more treats. She also delights in spoiling her twin grandsons at every opportunity.

Michael Cartledge, PA-C

Michael Cartledge PA-C is an experienced Physician Assistant with over 27 years of experience in primary care and family medicine. He is retired from the U.S. Army Medical Specialty Corps and has worked in North Carolina for over 20 years.

Mr. Cartledge graduated from the University of Oklahoma with honors as a Physician Assistant. Additionally, he completed his Master’s degree from the University of Nebraska with a concentration in family medicine.

Michael has a passion for primary care and especially diabetes. When a patient struggles with such a life-changing diagnosis as diabetes, Michael focuses on the patient by spending the necessary time with them and their family to control this disease and the many new interventions available to our patients.

Kerry Willis, MD

Dr. Willis is a practicing Physician at Open Water Medical PA. He founded the practice over 30 years ago in Beaufort, NC, and has overseen its growth to multi-site locations in NC. Dr. Willis is a graduate of NC State University for undergraduate studies, the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, and completed his Medical training at the Family Medicine Center at East Carolina University.

He returned home to Carteret County 32 years ago and opened the practice. A believer in community involvement, Dr. Willis has been active in local sports programs as a team Physician and active in the fight against prescription opioid abuse as a speaker for regional seminars and provider of services for the Loaves and Fishes Drug Rehabilitation program. He is involved with the NC Academy of Family Medicine as part of the committee members working to improve the healthcare delivery system and its structure.

He is the husband of his awesome wife Kimberly and a father to two incredible young men, Samuel and Benjamin, and a grandfather to his three grandchildren, Baily, Brooke, and Rhett. He enjoys introducing innovative technologies to primary care practices, hunting with his bird dogs, and any kind of fishing that allows him to enjoy the great outdoors of North Carolina in his off time.