Posted: February 5, 2010

Hampton Roads native and registered nurse Caroline Taylor was working in home health care in the mid-1990s when she decided she wanted to start a business.

"I wanted to create my own business model, but I needed to find a problem, corporate or industrial, that companies were having an issue with," Taylor said.

What she found in her research was that companies lost productivity when employees had to leave the job site for physicals, vaccines and other job-related medical services.

"A lot of these companies are required to have certain medical services supplied to their employees," Taylor said. "But when you have 600 to 1,000 employees, sending them out affects productivity and the bottom line."

And so Taylor Made Diagnostics was born in 1995 with a mobile medical service allowing companies to serve employees and keep them close to the job site, thus improving productivity.

The Taylor Made Diagnostics mobile units headed out to job sites, which worked well, Taylor said, but some employees and new hires missed the screenings. So, in 1999, the company opened its first office offering a wealth of industrial medical services. The company still has its vans out each week, but anyone who misses the screenings and mobile dates can visit the office.

The business has grown from annual medical services to day-to-day operations including wellness, workman's comp cases, federally required physicals, respirator fittings, drug screenings and a host of other services that fall under the industrial medicine umbrella. The company even handles injuries.

"We can deal with pieces of metal in an eye," Taylor said. "We cast and suture."

She made a decision to open the company's newest office close to most of her customers in South Norfolk, so that even if employees have to leave the job site, they are usually only a few minutes away.

"This wouldn't be a place to be selling lingerie," Taylor said of the industrial location, but it serves her customers well. These include BAE Systems, Norfolk Southern Corp. and the city of Norfolk. nib

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- Mary Worrell