Our Providers

Jo Alexander, PTA

Jo has been working as a physical therapist assistant at Gifford since 2016. She is a lifelong resident of the Upper Valley and a strong advocate for her community. She has a special interest in persistent pain and assisting people to move for long-term management. She specializes in tendon injuries, both acute and chronic.

Outside the clinic, Jo attends online Pilates classes, walks in the woods with her sweetie, and loves winter running.

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Steven Andreasen, DPM

Dr. Andreasen received his Doctorate in Podiatric Medicine from Kent State University in Ohio and attended the same residency program as another one of Gifford’s Podiatrists, Dr. Nick Benoit. After some good conversations with Dr. Benoit, Dr. Andresen decided to come to Gifford because of its rural community setting. He has an interest in sports medicine and has extensive experience in diabetic care. Currently, Dr. Andreasen is seeing patients at Gifford in Randolph and the Sharon Health Center.

“To be working in a rural setting where people treat each other like family is exciting. I am continually reading and studying different treatments because I want to present every option possible.”

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Bruce W. Andrus, MD, FACC

Dr. Andrus spent close to 20 years as a cardiologist at DHMC. During that time, he also served as a consulting cardiologist at Gifford, providing outreach once a week. For most of his career, Dr. Andrus felt it was important to be involved with the high-tech aspects of cardiology. Now, he wants to focus on clinical cardiology and contribute to optimizing Gifford’s cardiovascular systems of care.

“The patient-physician relationship is very important. It has to be based on mutual respect and trust. I enjoy getting to know people and their families, understanding their backgrounds, and their philosophy towards health care.” 

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Oliver Barnyak, MD

Oliver is very excited to be at Gifford. There’s a variety of patients who come through the emergency room doors, which is what first peaked his interest in emergency medicine.

“It is still my favorite aspect of medicine and nowhere gives you more of that than a small, rural ED.”

Point of care ultrasound and delivering palliative care from within the Emergency Department are Oliver’s passions.

When he’s not in the ED, Oliver enjoys hiking, cooking, sailing, and skiing with his wife and two dogs.

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Julie Bascom, CCC-SLP

Julie Bascom, CCC-SLP enjoys helping adult patients and their families manage and understand their new or changing swallowing difficulties and to identify meaningful personal goals.

She is a good listener and assists her patients with achieving their goals for their greatest quality of life. Each patient has different desires and goals for therapy outcomes and she tries to help make that happen for each of them.

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Jeffrey Bath, MD

Dr. Bath is a Board Certified radiologist who enjoys small hospital radiology, participating in the evaluation and imaging diagnosis of patients involving nearly all specialties, from pediatrics to OB/GYN to orthopedics. In addition to interpreting x-ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, bone density and mammography exams, he also performs a range of procedures including large joint injections and breast biopsies. Helping other physicians and providers care for their patients through communication with clear, concise and helpful imaging reports has been his goal since starting practice over a decade ago.

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Nicolas Benoit, DPM

Dr. Benoit provides expert care in all aspects of foot and ankle related issues. He enjoys spending time with patients so he can fully explain problems and available treatment that will accommodate each individual’s needs. Dr. Benoit stays very active with his wife and two sons, enjoying all the opportunities the beautiful state of Vermont has to offer. He especially enjoys Telemark skiing, fishing, hiking, coaching his children’s sports, and spending as much time as possible at his camp on Lake Champlain.

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Jonathan Bjork, DPM

Podiatrist Dr. Jon Bjork enjoys working with patients of all ages and backgrounds and offers a wide-spectrum of foot and ankle care. He strives to meet patient-specific needs by taking time to understand individual concerns and providing reasonable expectations and treatment plans, whether it is in the form of preventative care in patients with Diabetes, or surgical intervention for deformities of the foot or fractures.

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Jared Blum, MD

Dr. Blum arrived at Gifford Health Care in 2016. While his specialty is Emergency Medicine, Dr. Blum’s passion is toxicology. “I enjoy the challenge of trying to make the diagnosis to help critically ill and sick patients in the ED,” Dr. Blum says. Certified by the American Board of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Blum received his MD from UVM’s College of Medicine. He attended Brown University for his residency.

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Kenneth Borie, DO

As a family medicine physician Dr. Borie enjoys seeing a baby for a well-child exam and then later in the day seeing the great-grandparents. He loves nursing home care as well and is strongly committed to caring for his long term patients towards the end of their lives. Teaching is also very important to Dr. Borie as he enjoys imparting his knowledge and wisdom to a new generation of physicians.

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Matthew Bouteiller, PA-C

Physician Assistant, Matthew Bouteiller, joined Gifford’s staff in 2019 in the Emergency Medicine department. He has extensive knowledge of working with critically ill patients, having worked in the field for most of his twenty-year career. Before coming to Gifford, Matthew spent the majority of his emergency medicine career working at Mercy hospital in Springfield, Mass. with emergency medicine solutions. Nationally Certified, he received his PA at Springfield College in 2002. While he has stayed mostly in New England, Matthew has traveled to Peru and India for expedition and leadership training.

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Sheri Brown, DNP

Sheri has been practicing for close to 20 years since graduating from State University of New York at Stony Brook School of Medicine and getting her license to practice in Vermont. She received both her Bachelor’s and Associates degrees from Norwich University in Northfield.

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Kathleen Bryant, MPH, APRN, BC

As Gifford’s school-based nurse practitioner, Kathleen Bryant will primarily work with students in the health clinics of the local elementary and high schools. She has 20 years of experience as a nurse practitioner. During that time, she has worked in school-based health centers in Vermont, including Berlin where she created and coordinated a program in the local PreK-8 school. Bryant also spent time in nursing education at both Norwich University and the University of Vermont.

“By being in the school, you develop a different relationship with the children that you don’t get with a periodic visit to the clinician’s office.”

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Daniela Caserta, MA, LMFT

She/Her

Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) Daniela Caserta works with patients of all ages on their mental health journey. Her approach to care begins with using a developmental lens to determine what is organically or biologically indicated and goes from there: “We all get to be writers of our story,” she says. “While we are living a story that we did not author, we can create our to-be-determined narrative. When someone possesses that sense of determination to change their story, it’s really where science and humanity meet.”

Daniela says trauma is inherent in the human experience but varied in how it affects people. She works to reduce shame around the effects of trauma and helps patients mitigate those effects going forward.

Daniela is mom to two 20-something daughters, and lives with her husband, mother, and dog in central Vermont, where she’s been over 20 years. She enjoys walking, reading, puzzle games, and spending time on the water.

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Amy Chiriatti, MPT

Amy Chiriatti, MPT has been working in general outpatient orthopedics for nearly 20 years. She likes the run-of-the-mill orthopedic issues, as well as specific and unusual cases. Dry needling has been a beneficial tool for her treatment style, as well as other hands-on techniques for soft tissue and joint mobilizations. She develops specific exercises and therapeutic treatments to target individual needs for patients at their current level – whether sedentary or competitive. Her active lifestyle reflects what she wants for her clients.

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Ovleto Ciccarelli, MD

Dr. Ciccarelli received his medical degree from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and has been in practice for more than 20 years. He completed a residency at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut.

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Melanie Clark, FNP

She/Her

Family Nurse Practitioner Melanie Clark serves on the Primary Care team at Chelsea Health Center. Her approach to patient care is holistic. “My goal, always, is to encompass the whole patient,” she says. “I utilize evidence-based guidelines and policies to provide optimum care with compassion.”

Melanie’s vast clinical experience includes a wide range of care for all ages in a fast-paced urgent care setting; wellness care, routine health maintenance, and psychological support in a family health setting in an underserved area; obstetric and gynecological care for women; pediatric care for children of all ages; and medical and surgical nursing care for patients with acute and chronic illness, oncology care, and palliative care in a small community hospital.

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Kate Clemente, PA-C

Kate Clemente knew from an early age that she wanted to work in health care, inspired in part by her mother, who has worked as a PA since the 1970s. As a Vermont native, she finds making connections with patients the most rewarding aspect of her work, and is drawn to Gifford’s sense of community. “I am very tightly tied to my community—central Vermont is my home—and Gifford is small, intimate, warm and caring.” When not at work, she enjoys mountain biking, skiing, climbing, making stained glass, blacksmithing, woodworking, and spending time with her two dogs.

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Patrice Conard, PT

Physical therapist Patrice Conard, PT enjoys being part of Gifford’s rehabilitation and medical teams but also takes great joy in caring for members of her own community. Her experience in acute rehabilitation, burn and wound care, and lymphedema are all skills she applies to her work with her patients.

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Julia Cook, CNM

Julia brings a wealth of knowledge to our team of midwives at Gifford Medical Center. She spent a dozen years as a labor and delivery nurse before becoming a midwife. She works with women of all ages to assist in their reproductive health goals.

“I’m here to provide women the information they need to make healthy decisions for themselves and for the birthing process.”

Julia’s care isn’t just limited to those who are pregnant and loves seeing the children whose births she attended grow and develop.

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Rachel Coombs, MD

She/Her

“For me, the most rewarding aspect of practicing family medicine is the ability to connect with people about what is most important to them. This allows us to create a shared vision of health and work toward it together. And I enjoy providing full-spectrum care where I’m able to care for the entire family, from pregnancy, birth, and beyond through geriatrics and everything in between. Seeing my patients in their family context helps me understand them on a deeper level, which is so important for community health.”

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Sandy Craig, MD

Dr. Sandy Craig joins Gifford’s Hospitalist team in the next chapter of a career that’s taken him across the globe. A Vermont native, Dr. Craig attended UVM for medical school and trained in the top Family Medicine program in the U.S. at UNC Chapel Hill. He’s been on three tours of international medical relief work in Asia and Africa. Dr. Craig came back to Vermont and spent 12 years at a family practice in Plainfield, before coming to Gifford. Because of his wide range of interests from Hospital Medicine to Infectious Disease, Dr. Craig is a firm believer in the value of a broad and eclectic perspective, collaborating with various health care providers in listening to patients.

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Christina DiNicola, MD

She/Her

Dr. Christina DiNicola isn’t just a pediatrician, but also a wife and mother of two daughters. She devotes her medical practice to the care of children and adolescents from newborn through college. Her clinical interests involve helping families build healthy lifestyle habits early on in order to maintain good health and prevent later illness. She enjoys building a partnership with families to help build mental and physical wellbeing and to treat the full variety of pediatric illnesses and disorders.

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Marda Donner, MD

After more than two decades as a partner in a busy practice outside Philadelphia focusing on pulmonary diseases, critical care, and sleep medicine, I retired to Vermont in 2007. Currently my practice is limited to interpretation of pulmonary function studies and evaluation of patients for the pulmonary rehabilitation program at Gifford.

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J. Andrew Dreslin, MD

Dr. Dreslin, who sees patients at Gifford’s Berlin and Randolph locations, brings a personalized approach to patient care that is focused on education. “I like to get to know my patients, about their home life, and who they are. I also use a lot of educational items, to explain anatomy and thoroughly answer any questions a patient may have. I find providing education helps with patient outcomes. Additionally, because I find urology so interesting, I think that my enthusiasm for the things we talk about really comes through.”

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