AURORA | One year after creating one of Colorado’s largest health care providers seemingly overnight, the architects and executives of that group say that while expectations have been high, the challenges have been higher.
“If we were to list what we’ve done in the last 12 months, it’s been pretty astounding. Benefits and finance (for 15,000 employees), implementation of a computer system that revolutionizes care … it’s been tremendous,” said Rulon Stacey, president of UCHealth.
“We’ve done mass amounts of work. It’s almost putting together a new city for a year,” said Bruce Schroffel, CEO of UCHealth.
After the group announced that University of Colorado Hospital would merge with Poudre Valley Health System at the end of January 2012, officials set out an ambitious schedule for UCHealth to grow. Included in that initial merger was Poudre Hospital in Fort Collins, Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland and their affiliated clinics. Ivinson Memorial in Laramie, Wyo., was included as an affiliate of UCHealth.
“I have much more gray hair than I had a year ago,” Schroffel said. “It was more intense than we thought it would be. (But) it’s been extraordinarily exciting.”
The initial merger included three hospitals and two health systems in Colorado that saw over 40,000 hospital admissions between them in 2011.
That would have been tough enough. Then in October 2012, UCHealth added Memorial Central Hospital in Colorado Springs and Memorial North Hospital in northern Colorado Springs, just six months into the nascent organization’s history.
“It’s tough to bring any organization together like this,” Stacey said. “And there’s certainly a lot of data that suggests mergers don’t last.”
But effectively creating a four-state network of hospitals and clinics has presented its share of challenges and rewards over the last year, Stacey said. The implementation of a $140 million computer system to link the hospitals and clinics together has been an investment that’s garnered national attention. Collaboration between the University of Colorado Cancer Center and clinics has just begun. And the interdependency between the hospitals and the school that serves as the group’s namesake has been crucial.
“I think what we would have to do is find the fine line between expanding too fast and capitalizing on opportunities that may come up,” Stacy said. “We want to make sure we get what we have working effectively.”
And for now, and the foreseeable future, that means inserting UCHealth into a reliable organization for the university to deliver clinical care and revenue to complement the school’s research and teaching missions.
“The academic mission enables us to be different,” Scroffel said. “It allows (UCHealth) to be on the cutting edge of care.”
Schroffel said he envisions a system in the future where doctors can fulfill research projects, teach students and deliver care within closely related systems to maximize patient care. Creating those organizations was necessary, he said, because of dwindling revenues from state and federal governments and the National Institutes of Health for the university and research.
“(The school) receives almost nothing, they’re very dependent on research dollars and NIH funding is going down every year. NIH will go down, their research dollars have not kept up with inflation,” he said. And state funding for the school has been near nonexistent, he said.
That’s also part of the larger budget reality for UCHealth. As part of the Affordable Care Act, payments from the federal government will be dramatically different for hospitals and providers.
“The trick in the next year is trying to manage that health care reform so it’s not going to complicate any delivered care,” Stacey said. “Bundled payments, pay-for-performance, whatever it is, each of the organizations are better off now to handle that than they were.”
“All of our employees are going to learn how to deliver care, and they’re going to have do it differently,” Schroffel said.
Earlier this year, reports that UCHealth would consider creating an HMO to control more of those payments and expenses were something the organization had never excluded, but never considered.
“It’s funny, the day that story ran, we had a planning meeting later and eliminated that as a possibility … there was never any real chance it was going to happen,” Stacey said. “It brings a lot of risk that as a young organization, we’re not willing to provide. As we address the future, the HMO option is not one that will be
considered.”
UCHealth By The Numbers
Employees: 14,711
CHMG (Physicians): 576
MHS: 4,162
PVHS: 5,452
UCH: 4,373
Licensed hospital beds: 1,495
MHS: 583
UCH: 407
PVHS: 281
Medical Center of the Rockies: 148
Memorial North: 88
Hospital admissions 2011: 69,993
MVS: 25,663
PVHS: 22,150
UCH: 22,180
Emergency room visits 2011: 276,264
MHS: 135,517
PVHS: 74,852
UCH: 65,895