MONROE — Valley General Hospital has narrowed its list of prospective business partners to one — Providence Regional Medical Center Ev
erett.
Now, the two organizations will spend the next 60 days trying to develop a specific proposal on what type of partnership they want, from adding new services in Monroe to having Providence lease or buy the public hospital.
“The basic criteria is we’ll keep a hospital here and it will be a growing hospital,” said Mike Liepman, Valley’s chief executive.
Two major trends have led the Skykomish Valley hospital to consider giving up at least some of its autonomy as a tax-supported community hospital.
Valley General has lost money for four consecutive years, starting in 2007, including $3 million in losses last year.
Nationally, smaller health care organizations are once again joining up with larger ones, in part because larger organizations have more access to the financing needed for expensive health care programs, expansions and upgrades.
In February, it invited health care organizations to submit ideas for potential business partnerships.
In Snohomish County, two big organizations, Providence and Swedish Health Services, increasingly are battling for market share.
Last year, Swedish took over administration of the former Stevens Hospital in Edmonds, another public hospital. Swedish, a private, nonprofit hospital, also opened a stand-alone emergency room near the 128th Street exit of I-5 south of Everett earlier this year.
Providence, meanwhile, will open a new $460 million medical tower in downtown Everett in June; it will have one of the state’s largest emergency rooms.
This increasingly competitive health care market can leave smaller organizations battling for recognition.
Valley General, with a $55 million budget, has to compete with organizations like Providence’s hospital in Everett. Its $600 million budget is more than 10 times bigger.
“All the emergency room wars going on between Swedish and Providence — we’re sort of collateral damage,” Liepman said.
“So every time someone picks up the paper and sees these (ads for) emergency rooms, we become that much farther behind in their memory bank.
“We want to keep those people here,” he said.
Joining up with Providence could allow the hospital to offer more services. As one example, medical specialists could open offices in Monroe. Skykomish Valley residents could get those services closer to home, rather than commuting to Everett, Seattle, Redmond or Bellevue.
So what’s in the deal for Providence? For several decades, health care organizations have been developing a hub-and-spoke system, similar to the airlines.
An alliance would help send more patients from growing east Snohomish County to Providence clinics, specialists and its new hospital.
Providence already has 18 physicians at its clinic across the street from the hospital, said Dave Brooks, Providence’s chief executive.
The Monroe and Everett hospitals now work with the same radiology, laboratory, and pathology groups as well as several medical specialty groups, Brooks said.
Brooks said he hopes the two organizations can come to an agreement quickly. Yet many issues need to be resolved before such a move could go forward.
Everett’s hospital is part of Providence Health & Services, a not-for-profit Catholic health care organization with hospitals and clinics in five Western states.
Valley General is supported in part through a taxing district in east Snohomish County. With one of the smaller taxing rates of any public hospital in the state — 10 cents for every $1,000 in property value — it generated $1.37 million last year.
Whether the hospital’s taxing district or its current three-member elected board would continue to exist are just two of many legal issues that would have to be resolved.
When Swedish took over operations in Edmonds, that hospital district’s elected board decided to retain taxing authority.
If an agreement can be reached with Valley General, Providence could provide the same electronic medical records system in Monroe that it’s installing at its own hospital and clinics, Liepman said. The cost of installing the system at Valley is estimated at $9 million to $11 million.
Any patient who has had to fill out multiple forms as they are referred from their primary care doctor to a specialist, to another office for tests and then perhaps to a hospital can appreciate the benefits.
Additional appointments could be booked before a patient leaves the primary care office, Liepman said. Tests results would be easily available to any medical specialist to whom the patient would be referred. It would reduce the time lags that can result when one office waits to hear the test results from another medical office.
“I’m hoping we can elevate the level of care here,” Liepman said of the prospects of joining with Providence. “We’ll bring care to Monroe that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486 or salyer@heraldnet.com
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
