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New Hope For A Struggling Hospital In Southwest Kansas

Bryan Thompson
/
Heartland Health Monitor
The Hamilton County Hospital

A southwest Kansas hospital on the verge of having to close its doors appears to have a new lease on life, thanks to a new management contract with an Oklahoma company.

The Hamilton County Hospital, in Syracuse, has been struggling financially for years.

This March, Hamilton County Commissioners refused to put any more burden on the county’s taxpayers to support the hospital. Instead, they formed a special committee to look for other options to preserve access to health care.

Local Ford dealer Mark Davis served on the committee. When asked how close the hospital was to shutting down, he responds: “Weeks, being zero cash, not being able to make payroll.”

Davis says his oldest son would like to move back to Syracuse with his wife and new baby.

“I told him, 'No, you can’t come home if there’s not 24-hour emergency care.' She can’t get up in the middle of the night, and have a baby with a 104 temperature that needs to go to an emergency room, and know that maybe there’s a blizzard going on here, or whatever, and that she’s got to get to wherever, Garden City, to see a doctor,” he says.

The committee requested proposals from other hospitals in the area. Hospital board chairman Ron Munyan didn’t like the responses.

“One hospital wanted just to do the clinic, and close the hospital," Munyan says. "So, what happens when somebody needs to go into a bed? Well, you go to Lakin, Johnson, or Tribune, or Garden City, all right? So that was not too good of an idea.”

In fact, none of the area hospitals proposed a way to keep the hospital in Syracuse open. The issue has divided townspeople. One woman, who would not speak on the record, said she’d rather drive to another hospital than pay any more taxes. The hospital’s interim CEO, Rob Rawlings, told the hospital board at a meeting last month they had barely enough money in the bank to keep paying their employees.

“We should end the week with about $128,000 in cash," Rawlings says. "And again as you walk down through here, it looks like we can get through, now, it looks like the second week of May, assuming everything stays the same.”

But everything is not staying the same. Maybe it’s blind luck. Mark Davis calls it divine intervention. Either way, Dr. Richard Carter, from Edmond, Oklahoma, happened to be at a hospital in the Oklahoma panhandle a few weeks ago. Someone there mentioned the problems at the Hamilton County Hospital, so Carter boarded his private helicopter and headed for Syracuse. Carter, a family practice doctor, operates Carter Professional Care. The company specializes in rescuing ailing rural hospitals.

“All of the physicians I know really care about patient care, and patient health," Carter says. "And, as a family practice doctor, you look at where is that needed the most? And it’s definitely the rural community.”

Mark Davis says he and the other committee members were as thorough as they could be in checking on Carter’s track record.

“Carter’s group moved into five critical access hospitals, as we are, in Oklahoma," Davis says. "One of them was actually four days away from closing when they first heard about it. And all of those hospitals that they have taken over management of are still open. Not much better endorsement than that.”

Carter says the Hamilton County Hospital has been losing between $80,000 and $110,000 a month, but it’s still in better shape than some he’s seen. He’s optimistic that his team can put the hospital back in the black, so much so that he’s signed a 10-year agreement to manage the facility. Carter expects to lose money on the operation for the first two or three years, but he thinks it will turn around. He says the key to saving rural hospitals is not to keep cutting services to hold costs down, but to provide quality care close to home.

“I believe that 80 to 90 percent of health care can be achieved locally, at a relatively low cost," Carter says. "We’re just not seeing that. Like I said, we’re seeing sometimes 10 to 20 percent utilization of the facilities.”

Carter says patients should be transferred to a larger facility when specialty care not available at the local hospital is needed. But then he wants to bring those patients back to their local facility once they’re stabilized. He says that’s good financially for the larger hospitals and the rural hospitals—and being closer to family and friends is generally better for the patient, too. With an estimated one-third of all critical access hospitals at risk of closing, you can bet many people will be watching to see how well this model works.