Barbara DeLoach
By Justin Jarrett
Barbara DeLoach — better known to most folks as Cooky — gestures almost dismissively toward her long and impressive resume and turns her focus to a handwritten screed in front of her. “That’s good,” she says of her lengthy list of personal accomplishments, “but this is the really exciting stuff.”
Before her are notes from her genealogical research about her family’s history — the Aimar line — which can be traced back to ninth-century France and includes the founder of the House of Bourbon. This Aimar lived in Souvigny, the Bourbonais area of France. Some of the pieces of the puzzle are missing, but DeLoach has evidence she comes from the French royal line that includes Marie Antoinette.
Still, she is mistaken — this is not more exciting than the work DeLoach has done right here in Beaufort.
The family line also includes a history of pharmacists, and that’s the tradition DeLoach continued and advanced as a pioneer in the industry. Her uncles, Charles and Neal Aimar, were pharmacists in Beaufort, and DeLoach was involved in the family pharmacy while growing up in North Carolina. “I grew up in my daddy’s drugstore, and I was helping him dust bottles and actually folding powder papers when I could barely reach up to the counter,” DeLoach recalls.
She initially thought she would break that line and attended Queens College of Charlotte with the intention of becoming a missionary before changing course and transferring to the University of North Carolina to study pharmacy, earning honors as the outstanding student in her graduating class at Chapel Hill. She then earned a master’s degree in histochemistry from the University of South Carolina.
DeLoach quickly rose in her field, becoming active in the state pharmacy association — eventually becoming president — and working with the state board of pharmacy and later serving as chairman.
During that time, she attended a conference at which she was introduced to a new technological advance in the field — home-based intravenous drug infusion was gaining popularity, and Medicare was poised to begin covering the new treatment. “They wanted to get people out of the hospitals quicker,” she recalls. “It saves money, and you’re not exposed to the big, bad germs that are in the hospitals. “I decided I was going to do that myself.”
DeLoach went out of her way to study every component of the new practice and in 1985 established Medical Specialties, Inc. — the first privately-owned home IV infusion service in South Carolina. In 1990, she added Atlantic Home Health to provide home-based nursing, and was able to provide patients with home IV infusion, medical equipment, and nurses all with one call from the hospital. “That just grew like crazy,” she says. “Like the Dollar General stores.”
DeLoach sold the initial company to Savannah’s Memorial Health in 1994 but returned to the specialized field in 2000 when she established IV Specialists, Inc., to provide the same services. The second company was sold to Ambient Healthcare in 2012. “The more complicated the patient was, the more intriguing it was,” DeLoach recalls. “The stories and the characters that I ran into were just amazing.” Barbara is married to Robert DeLoach, also descending from the French Bourbon line. Barbara, with Robert, is a member of The Baptist Church of Beaufort. She has also served as a deacon and elder in the First Presbyterian Church.
Not surprisingly, DeLoach inspired four of her five children to follow her into the medical field in one way or another — her eldest son is an ophthalmologist in North Carolina, one daughter is a pediatrician, another is a veterinarian, and a third works in finance for a non-profit hospital. The fifth, her second-born son, inherited his mother’s entrepreneurial spirit and developed the world’s first interdisciplinary bachelor of arts and masters of fine arts degree offerings in sound design at Savannah College of Art and Design. “I say my children have been successful not because of me, but in spite of me,” DeLoach says with a laugh.
Once again, she is almost certainly mistaken. Centuries from now, her ancestors might gesture dismissively toward a list of their own accomplishments and point toward notes about their ancestors — particularly a woman named Cooky, whose ingenuity left a lasting mark.