Kaleida-ECMC coexistence is key to ‘historic’ plan
Published: July 02, 2009, 12:30 am
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A potentially historic plan on how Kaleida Health and Erie County Medical Center could coexist— without merging — was unveiled Wednesday by a steering committee of doctors from both medical groups.
“This is truly what everyone believes is a historic time,” said Dr. Lawrence B. Bone, an ECMC surgeon and the steering committee chairman. “When have we had an opportunity to take two hospitals that were at odds with each other and combine them to give greater service and improved service to Western New York citizens?”
Some highlights from the doctors’ recommendations:
• The bulk of cardiac care should move from ECMC to the “global vascular institute” that will rise next to Kaleida’s Buffalo General Hospital, but ECMC should retain the cardiac services that support its emergency room and trauma treatment.
• A new center focused on bone health should be placed at ECMC, with the hope that it attracts specialists in rheumatology, geriatrics, endocrinology and other areas affecting bone health.
• A separate area for elective orthopedic surgeries should be placed at ECMC.
• Elective spine surgeries should be consolidated at Buffalo General in conjunction with the global vascular institute.
• Orthopedic programs at Buffalo General, Millard Fillmore Suburban, Women & Children’s Hospital, DeGraff Memorial and Klein Road Ambulatory Surgery Center should continue.
• Kidney-and pancreas-transplant programs should be consolidated at ECMC and given room to grow.
•A centralized service should be created to guide critical patients from outlying community hospitals into beds within the “Great Lakes Health” system.
Great Lakes Health of Western New York is the board overseeing the state-spurred integration of ECMC and Kaleida. At its heart is the 17-member “professional steering committee” of medical professionals — almost evenly split between Kaleida and ECMC — who spent months examining where to place services.
The research ultimately involved about 75 doctors sitting on several subcommittees. Their collective work forms the blueprint that could determine the health care landscape for current and future generations.
The recommendations were described this week to a joint meeting of the boards of Great Lakes Health, ECMC and Kaleida. Those respective organizations are expected to analyze the feasibility of the list and form an implementation plan that addresses, among other things, labor contracts and financing.
Another committee member said the list of proposed moves has been designed to ensure that no facility suffers significant financial harm.
“Instead of stealing each other’s patients, we looked to see: How do we create a topflight program?” said Dr. Kevin J. Gibbons, Kaleida’s program director for neurosurgery and a committee member.
The arranged marriage, or cooperative, of ECMC and Kaleida was required by the state’s Berger Commission, which was asked to recommend efficiencies in New York’s hospital network. Once the dust settled, Kaleida and ECMC, as well as the region, needed a plan on how the institutions should spread their efforts and assets.
“Competition in health care increasingly is becoming competition between regions — less about the hospital here and the hospital down the street and increasingly between hospitals in this region and hospitals in another region,” said Bruce A. Boissonnault of the Niagara Health Quality Coalition, a nonprofit consumer watchdog on health care. “So I think this move reflects a reality that has been emerging for a few years now, probably close to a decade.”
Yet more financial help will be required from state government, he said.
“The Berger Commission made it clear in its re-engineering of our hospital systems that our region had farther to travel than any other,” Boissonnault added. “And many in the community opined appropriately that it may require more help because we had more work to do.”
The doctors believe that their recommendations, if adopted, will be visible in just a few years. Ground is expected to be broken within weeks on the global vascular institute—a critical component. Other construction and expansion projects, they predicted, are not far off.
“I think if you said in five years we are going to have a completely different look, I think that’s realistic,” Bone said.
Said Gibbons: I think some of this will take five years, but you are going to see major changes within two or three years.”
“If we can improve our tertiary services,” Gibbons said, “and create a regional approach to prevention, our quality of life will improve as well as our longevity, and that will be a plus for every patient and physician in Western New York.”
mspina@buffnews.com
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