LIMA — Only a few miles separate St. Rita’s Medical Center from Lima Memorial Health System. However, the footprint they have on this area extends much further and deeper.
Between them, they have nearly 4,000 employees, with St. Rita’s ranking as the No. 1 employer in Allen County and Lima Memorial two spots behind at No. 3.
They each service a 10-county area, bringing treatment centers to towns like Ottawa, Delphos, Ada, Elida, Columbus Grove, Spencerville, Celina, Cridersville and Wapakoneta.
For the chief executive officers of these two hospitals, providing the region with first-class health care goes beyond buzz words like “volume-based health care” or a “value-based system.”
It is about people, extending affordable health care to as many of them as possible, from heart surgery to emergency room care — and everything in between.
It is about developing a highly skilled staff through recruiting and work place development.
CEOs Bob Baxter, of St. Rita’s Medical Center, and Mike Swick, of Lima Memorial Health System, recently sat down with The Lima News. In individual interviews, they discussed the issues facing the health care industry, and shared the tactics each hospital is taking to ensure more patients have access to quality health care.
Volume to value
Swick and Baxter agreed that the health care industry is undergoing a transition, with the focus changing from volume-based health care to a value-based system.
Baxter explained that this transition is focused on keeping people healthy, not just treating them when they are sick.
“At a more fundamental level, it’s about how we become involved in improving health,” he said. “That means we have to get better at getting outside of ourselves, focusing more on wellness and prevention. It’s not necessarily when people come to us, but how we extend ourselves into the community.”
Swick said it’s reaching a point to where the hospitals are incentivized to provide preventative and home health care.
“If you’re a heart failure patient, if you come back within the next 30 days after we provide the initial care for you, we don’t get paid for that next admission,” he said. “They’re incentivizing us to get home health involved, so that’s what we’re doing.”
Swick said the hospital will even offer the first home visit for free, but some patients still refuse to take advantage of it.
“I understand they don’t want people in their house because it’s a privacy thing, but it’s still a concern,” he said. “If they didn’t get their medication because they can’t afford it, or they’re not taking the medication we prescribed, they’re going to be back in the next 30 days anyway. That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”
Health care legislation
As legislators work to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with another health care plan, there is a lot of uncertainty as to how these changes will affect patients on a local level.
Swick said that the ACA, also known as Obamacare, has positives and negatives. The beneficial part of the legislation, he said, is that it helps many Lima-area residents who previously did not have health insurance become insured. He said the down side is that it comes at a cost in terms of rising national debt and an increase in premiums for certain individuals.
“Ultimately, working people are paying for it,” Swick said. “It’s just a matter of how it’s being paid for.”
Swick was also concerned about efforts to repeal Obamacare without a replacement.
“That’s not the way to do it because you’re going to leave a lot of people potentially without insurance,” he said. “It needs to be a repeal and replace plan, and I think that’s eventually what we’ll go back to.”
Baxter said that, since St. Rita’s is a Catholic organization, part of its mission is to extend health care to as many people as possible, especially the poor and underserved. He acknowledged there are many ways to reach that point, though he did not say if he supported one health care plan over another.
“Our goal is to provide the best care in the world, regardless of what happens on a national level with regulation and legislation,” Baxter said.
At the end of the day, Baxter said the balance among cost, quality and access to health care is a never-ending dynamic that will continue to be an issue in the foreseeable future.
Workforce development
Another national issue that has extended to local communities is the shortage of workers in the health care field, especially nurses.
The CEOs both said they have ramped up efforts to recruit nurses by offering scholarships and student loan forgiveness. St. Rita’s offers 10, $1,500 scholarships to students in the area who have an interest in a health care career. Lima Memorial has partnered with Apollo Career Center and Rhodes State College, paying students to take classes with the understanding that they will work for the hospital for at least a year after they graduate.
Lima Memorial is also investing in its own associates, allowing workers the opportunity for career advancement through various programs paid for by the hospital.
“We realize the value of growing our own,” Swick said.
Baxter said the hospital has focused a great deal on workforce development, citing a rash of projected retirements for nurses in the next 10 years. He said there are three things people look for when they’re making a decision to join a hospital: practice life, quality of life and income.
He admitted that quality of life is something that is hard to control, but they can regulate income and practice life. Offering the latest technology is an advantage, he said, as well as the position recruiters who work with new hires to ensure their needs are met.
“We’ll do a survey of the candidates and their families in terms of what they’re interested in, so we try to learn about them before they get here,” Baxter said. “All these individuals have lots of opportunity, so the better we can be about our recruitment activity, the better we can be about addressing their needs.”
Lima Memorial has partnered with the Lima/Allen County Chamber of Commerce to develop a network of individuals from various backgrounds who they can pair with new health care employees with similar interests. Swick said this is especially important for people with different cultural backgrounds who are worried their children will not be properly exposed to their heritage.
Both of Lima’s hospital CEOs agree that the only sustainable advantage in today’s world of health care is the ability to change, adapt and evolve.
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Craig J. Orosz | The Lima News
