ARLINGTON — A proposal that calls for a Mount Vernon hospital to manage Cascade Valley Hospital has been endorsed by the Arlington hospital’s board.
The deal would mean that Cascade Valley Hospital would merge with Skagit Regional Health, said Clark Jones, Cascade’s chief executive. Both are public, tax-supported hospitals. Both would keep their publicly elected boards.
The proposal also calls for both Skagit Regional Health and Cascade Valley Hospital to work with University of Washington Medicine to provide more medical services in both the Arlington and Mount Vernon areas.
The two local hospitals will work together and “over a period of time will draw closer and closer to UW Medicine,” Jones said.
One of the first changes calls for UW Medicine to take over a Smokey Point clinic operated by the Arlington and Mount Vernon hospitals, Jones said. The $12 million, 42,000-square-foot building opened in 2012. It is scheduled to become a UW Medicine neighborhood clinic in mid-January, he said. An urgent care clinic, laboratory and cancer care services in the building will continue to be operated by the Mount Vernon hospital.
The goal is to bring more specialty care to the area, Jones said. “That could come from Skagit, that could come from UW Medicine,” he said.
If the arrangement between the three health care groups sounds familiar, it’s because they announced their intention to work out such a deal in March. The publicly elected boards of the Arlington and Mount Vernon hospitals took a more formal step Wednesday evening by voting to approve the agreement.
Even with that action, there are still several more steps before the deal becomes final. The Arlington and Mount Vernon hospital will take a final in-depth look at the deal for the next 150 days, Jones said. At the end of that time both hospitals will agree “we intend to close the deal or we won’t,” Jones said.
If it goes forward, the proposal would next be reviewed by the state Department of Health, a process that could take six months to a year. Such reviews are required when there is a lease, sale or purchase of all or part of an existing hospital.
In the proposed agreement, Skagit pledges to continue to operate Cascade’s current health care facilities, “guaranteeing continued health care in north Snohomish County,” Jones said.
That was the goal of the Arlington hospital’s board in seeking business agreements with other health care organizations, he said. “They realized several years ago that the health care environment was changing dramatically. A small hospital in an urban area was really going to have a difficult time surviving,” Jones said.
That’s because of the large capital needs needed by hospitals, such as buying new equipment and converting to electronic medical records, Jones said. “Those systems are very expensive,” he said. “We were going to run into the situation that we weren’t going to be able to generate the capital to keep up on those things.”
Skagit has said it will offer to retain Cascade’s current employees, Jones said. Cascade Valley Hospital has about 500 full- and part-time employees and has an operating budget of $50 million. It treats about 19,000 patients annually in its emergency room.
All three health care organizations have previously worked together on other projects. Both Cascade and Skagit joined UW Medicine last year as part of a larger network to treat Boeing employees, promising to provide better care while saving consumers money.
Sharon Salyer: 435-339-3486; salyer@heraldnet.com.
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