Meet Dr. Judy Packer, a true blessing to her patients, who number 70 and range in age from 55 to 103. For these people, who are mainly in their late 80s to early 90s, and often unable to get to a doctor’s office without great difficulty, the comforting sight of the Acura pulling into their driveway or the reassuring sound of the door buzzer can’t be understated.

Though the visits may hearken back to doctors’ calls of their youth, they are not always in domestic bedrooms. “I see those who live at home, in an assisted living facility, or in congregate housing,” explains Packer, who lives in Newton, where her practice is centered. Personal environments vary as well. “Some live with family, some alone,” she adds. “Many have family or hired caregivers, either part time, round the clock, or live-in.” Some, she explained, are fairly healthy but unable to easily make it to a doctor’s office. Others are quite ill.

When she began her practice, she took a few patients who lived at a greater distance, but soon found that her availability to them was curtailed when they became ill. Thus, she maintains a centralized radius of appreciative care recipients.

“Judy is a fantastic resource for our community,” said Jane Siegel of Newton, who noted that her husband Barry, a quadriplegic, has a very difficult time negotiating office buildings and outings. “Having a doctor come to our home is a wonderful thing,” she said. “Besides all this, she happens to be a terrific lady,” she added.

The sentiment is echoed by Marie Gannon, a 92-year-old Auburndale resident. “I feel very fortunate that I can make an appointment, and she comes to the house,“ she said, while lauding Packer’s loyalty and thorough evaluations, as well as her sense of humor. She also believes that Packer has been able to keep her out of the hospital. “Since I began seeing her about a year ago, this is the longest I’ve been able to stay out!” she said. Gannon was in the Leonard Morse Hospital and then in rehab in Braintree; her therapist recommended Packer when she mentioned that her doctor was planning to move.

Packer was born and raised in Oklahoma and Texas; her parents were from Boston.. Following Radcliffe College and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas, she trained in Albany in Internal Medicine, where she met her husband, Marvin Packer. Affiliated with Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, he works primarily on the automated medical record, and sees patients one day a week. The couple, married 27 years, has six children, aged 13 to 21.

Packer has practiced in a variety of settings, beginning in rural upstate New York for two years, where her patients ranged in age from 5-107. Following a year of travel that included six months in a kibbutz ulpan in Mishmar HaEmek in Israel, they relocated to Boston. She worked for ten years at Harvard Vanguard, then called HCHP’s, Wellesley Center before quitting to raise her children, the oldest two of whom were three and seven. Short-term jobs included serving as camp doctor at Camp Moshava in Indian Orchard, Pennsylvania, every summer but one, from 1993 to 2004. She opened her current practice in October, 2003.

“I had seen, from my mother-in-law’s illness,” she recalled, “that it is very hard to find supportive medical care for the frail elderly.” The term “homebound,” she explained, is vague. “Anyone can be gotten out of the house, by ambulance if necessary. But getting out to the doctor can be a true hardship, even for an older adult who is able to walk.” Prior to a doctor’s appointment, she recalled, her mother-in-law would worry, so that it affected her sleep. “When the day came, my husband and I would need to devote a half-day to the appointment, and she took a day afterward to recover from the exertion,” she said.

Packer realized that the health care delivery system, as it had developed over the past half century, was not geared toward home care. “Now, with the cutbacks in hospitalization, people are sicker at home than they used to be,” she said. “This was a part of medicine in which I truly felt I could make an important contribution, and not be just yet another doctor in Boston.”

Packer’s Orthodoxy followed a similarly circuitous route. “I come from a mixed marriage: Jewish mother, Catholic father, neither at all observant,“ she said. Her enjoyment of Sunday School at the local Reform synagogue in Tulsa alarmed her mother, who pulled her out. “Years later, when Marvin and I were planning our wedding, I had long discussions with a very spiritually-inclined Reform rabbi, Rabbi Laura Geller of Los Angeles,” she recalled. Geller exposed Packer to fuller Jewish observance, and over the next decade, the couple “gradually drifted to the right religiously, from Reform, to the Conservative minyan at Harvard Hillel, to a Reconstructionist havurah in Newton Centre, and then, after some reading and a great deal of thought and introspection, Orthodoxy,” she said.

The Packers, who share a strong belief in Jewish education, have sent four of their children to Maimonides. The other two attend Newton Public Schools, where Packer felt that their needs would be better served.

The consummate caregiver, Packer cites another major reason that she does what she does: the flexibility it allows her with regard to family. “In a conventional practice, the schedule is booked far ahead,” she explains. “It becomes very difficult to make small shifts for the school play, the dentist appointment, and so forth.”