A visiting team from LifePoint Hospital network made the rounds to their newly acquired hospitals in Haywood, Jackson and Swain counties over the past week. They pledged to roll up their sleeves and get to work fulfilling the promises made when courting the community hospitals here to join their national hospital network with a growing presence in North Carolina.

The MedWest system forged by the hospitals in Haywood, Jackson and Swain County three-and-a-years ago will dissolve, ending a short-lived partnership that was rocky almost from the start.

When Dr. Janine Keever hit the online shoe stores last month to hunt for the optimal pair of white knee-high platform boots, she wasn’t trying to spice up the look of her delivery room scrubs.

Instead, the retro footgear would be the perfect hallmark of her disco attire, donned in good fun and for a good cause during last weekend’s “That ‘70s Gala” fundraiser put on by the MedWest-Harris and Swain Foundation.

The medical community in Jackson and Swain counties has renewed its call to part ways with Haywood Regional Medical Center less than three years after forging an alliance under the MedWest banner.

MedWest leaders are struggling to hold a fledgling joint hospital venture together in the wake of recent physician turmoil, but there’s likely no easy fix for the identity crisis faced by Jackson County’s medical community.

Fearing the sanctity of Harris hospital is on the line, a group of Jackson County doctors went public two weeks ago with a litany of concerns. They aren’t alone. Doctors everywhere are desperate for solid ground, but instead have been caught up in the competitive turf wars playing out between hospitals.

Both MedWest-Harris and MedWest-Haywood have seen a troubling loss of patients to Mission Hospital in Asheville in recent years. Harris lost 10 percent of its in-patient business in just five years, most of it to Mission. Haywood lost 6 percent.

Indeed, both hospitals hoped the MedWest joint venture two years ago would shore up that erosion of patients. Both, however, seemed to have different ideas of how that would play out on the ground.

Was there enough business for both to stay the size they were, or would one ultimately evolve into the big kid on the block — and if so, who?

SEE ALSO: Jackson doctors fear underdog status in MedWest venture

“Is there enough to go around for two? I don’t know the answer to that,” said Dr. Waverly Green, a pulmonologist at Harris.

It’s a troubling proposition for doctors who have married their livelihoods to a particular hospital — from building up their practice to raising their families here — to have their careers hinge on forces outside their control.

“It is challenging to know who is going to remain standing,” said Miriam Schwarz, the director of the Western Carolina Medical Society, a trade group for doctors in the region. “I think this jockeying for position is in response to the current climate.”

Schwarz said the “tumultuous times” have put everyone on edge.

“In this time of uncertainty, what we are witnessing across the country is heightened worries, anxieties and concerns about how health care will be delivered in the future,” Schwarz said.

Big kid on the block

When the MedWest venture was formed two years ago, Jackson’s medical community had little to fear from its neighbor.

“There has historically been very little market overlap,” said Steve Heatherly, the president of Harris.

Fewer than 5 percent of patients from Jackson migrated to neighboring Haywood or vice-versa.

“We said, ‘We’ve got enough to do, they’ve got enough to do and that’s the way it should be,” said Dr. Earl Haddock, a cardiologist at Harris for 22 years.

The result: two neighboring medical communities, largely happy to serve their own patient base and competing very little amongst each other.

“We’ve always had a collegial relationship. It has never been a competitive thing. They took care of their county and we took care of ours,” said Dr. Randy Savell, a gastroenterologist at Harris.

Haywood clearly had the tougher row to hoe, however. Just 25 minutes from Asheville, it was all-too-easy for patients who subscribed to the “bigger is better” theory to opt for Mission.

“It would be hard to survive in Mission’s shadow like that,” Green admitted.

Harris, however, had been largely spared from the specter of Mission. For decades, Harris acted as a net, capturing patients from the more rural counties to its south and west. It was far enough away that patients would only go to Mission if they really needed to, not just because they could.

And compared to the smaller, more rural counties around it, Jackson had a leg up simply by having a hospital at all.

“A lot of people west of here would stop at Harris because the roads to Asheville were bad, and there was at least a specialist here,” said Dr. Joe Hurt, a retired pathologist who helped build up Jackson’s medical community in the late-1970s and early ‘80s.

As a result, it had grown much bigger — both in the size of the hospital and the breadth of its doctors — than it ever could have been if drawing from just Jackson County’s population.

Patients from Swain, Macon and Graham counties plus the Cherokee Reservation accounted for nearly 50 percent of Harris’ total in-patient business. Only 45 percent of its in-patient volume comes from Jackson itself, according to market share data collected by the state.

Desperate times

It’s quite likely that Jackson’s medical community saw itself as poised to emerge as the epicenter of MedWest.

Not only did Haywood have the geographic conundrum of Mission to grapple with, it was still trying to rebound from a damaged reputation after failing federal inspections in 2008. It was an unfortunate turn of events blamed more on bureaucracy and bad leadership than a reflection of its health care, but a PR crisis nonetheless.

But, there were other forces at play. Chiefly, Harris was no longer immune to the siphoning effect of Mission.

While losing patients to Mission was a long-standing struggle for Haywood, Harris was not used to fighting that battle, and the hospital for the first time found its bottom line in jeopardy.

Harris is now in its third round of layoffs in four years. A wing of the hospital has been closed simply because there aren’t enough patients to fill it. Cash on hand had been dwindling, and finances got so bad the hospital could barely keep up with bills it owed, from medical supplies to the Red Cross blood bank.

Fear that it could now lose patients to Haywood — if suspicions are true that Haywood has been anointed as the flagship of MedWest — proved too much for Jackson doctors to bear. It’s entire model had been thrown into uncertainty, and a sense of panic set it.

“What Carolinas did was put us in competition with Haywood inside MedWest. Harris has to keep every patient it can to survive itself,” said Dr. Bob Adams, a hospitalist at Harris for 36 years who has decided to leave the hospital.

Not everyone shares that view, however.

“I certainly don’t get a sense of significant friction between the two,” said Steve Heatherly, the president of Harris.

For its part, the Haywood medical community doesn’t feel that way either.

“There is no friction, no competition,” said Dr. Marvin Brauer, the chief of staff at Haywood and a hospitalist there.

But, Brauer does think the two neighboring medical communities could do more to bridge the county line between them.

Every hospital has regular monthly meetings of its doctors. Since uniting under the MedWest venture, the doctors in Haywood and Jackson had not taken steps to hold periodic joint meetings of both hospitals, something that may change now.

“I think we should start to try to integrate the medical staffs even more,” Brauer said.

Circling the wagons

MedWest leadership sees one way out: buckle down and reclaim market share it has lost to Mission.

“The whole goal for us to join together was to take back some of the market share in our communities,” Dr. Chris Catterson, an orthopedist at Haywood, said.

That alone could solve everything.

“If we were each getting a reasonable market share, about 70 percent, there would be no problems,” Brauer said. That would mark about a 10 percent gain over the market share they have now.

Dr. Richard Lauve, a national health care industry consultant and analyst, questioned whether the strategy jives with the unstoppable reality that health care is consolidating.

“You can’t win back market share in a consolidating marketplace. A growth strategy is not one that wins,” said Lauve, with L&A Consulting based in Louisiana.

Granted, community hospitals have arguable advantages that resonate with patients, even when going head-to-head against the big guy next door.

“These are neighbors taking care of neighbors. The services are closer. You don’t have the cattle call mentality you get at the bigger facilities. Those are all advantages you can work to improve your position,” Lauve said. “But, they don’t move 10 percentage points of market share.”

That said, from a purely objective view, something has to give, Lauve said. Lauve was recently a guest speaker at a roundtable hosted by the Western Carolina Medical Society, attended by doctors and hospital CEOs from a dozen or so counties in the region.

Lauve’s answer was short and sweet when asked whether both Haywood and Harris could keep up their historical model: “No.”

Two mirror-image hospitals of that size simply can’t exist in neighboring rural communities 20 miles apart.

“You can’t repeat services that close together and make them both work,” Lauve said. “One of them will either fail completely and the other survive — or they need to sit down and make decisions about what makes sense for each community to have.”

In Lauve’s view, it’s time for those tough choices. And that might mean each hospital won’t have everything it had before.

“It is a political process — the interaction of human beings trying to figure out how to divide a pie,” Lauve said.

Fold or draw?

That’s one reason some Jackson doctors believe the right thing for their community is to get out and get out now. If one of the two hospitals is destined to get smaller, why keep heading down a path that is setting up their hospital to shrink?

Adams fears that die has already been cast.

“Harris devolves, and Haywood grows. It is not that they have anything against Harris. (Carolinas HealthCare) has an interested in right-sizing their components,” said Adams.

But, Jackson doctors say any strategy to make Haywood the new net to capture health care business from the rural western counties is flawed, because of the same long-standing geographic conundrum Haywood has always struggled under.

“You aren’t going to get most of the people in Western North Carolina to stop 25 miles short of Asheville to go to Haywood,” Hurt said. Once in the car and on the road, they’ll go the extra miles, he said.

Adams said it would take years to change the historical  patterns of patients. If their own community hospital can’t do it, they will just go to Mission rather than the community hospital in another county, which patients would see as merely a lateral move.

“It is not a suburb of Atlanta or Charleston or Charlotte where a whole bunch of people who are moving in from somewhere else without a history or tradition can be influenced by marketing where to go,” Adams said.

In recent months, Adams and a group of Jackson doctors have advocated walking away from MedWest and instead partnering with Mission.

A mercenary stance perhaps, but they hope Harris would be built up by Mission as a go-to hospital for the western counties, a catch-all for health care from the rural west.

Adams said he understands why Haywood’s medical community would see Mission as simply too close for comfort.

“I think the medical community in Haywood County would be very concerned about Mission because I think they would feel more threatened,” Adams said. “Clearly, because of the proximity, it is a bigger concern for the Haywood community than for Harris.”

But, Jackson should look out for Jackson first, he said.

“For each hospital and each community who is the best partner for that individual community? I think that the communities may have different perspectives about that,” Adams said.

Not all Jackson County doctors are sold on Adams’ line of thinking, however. Several voiced their trepidation toward Mission at a hospital-wide meeting of Harris doctors in January. Adams’ camp had called on their fellow doctors at the meeting to send a message up the chain to Harris’ board of directors: they were unsatisfied with MedWest and wanted to vet Mission as a prospective new partner.

A few doctors were not swayed, however.

“The people who voted against it were concerned about their perception of Mission’s behaviors over the past 20 years where they had been aggressive and wanted everything to come to Asheville,” Adams said. But,“We felt that Mission’s attitude had changed significantly.”

The game-changer, in Adams view, is the new CEO who took over at Mission two years ago, Ron Paulus.

The former CEO, Joe Demore, was seen as an empire builder, one who was interested in grabbing up smaller hospitals in Mission’s net to promote an Asheville-centric model. Demore was ultimately forced out after a vote of no confidence by doctors practicing at Mission.

When Paulus came on board, he immediately began touting a collaborative regional view of health care, with small community hospitals across Western North Carolina working together under one system.

Paulus maintains Mission doesn’t want to compete with the smaller hospitals but genuinely wants to let them keep their own patients except when Mission’s services are truly needed.

The claim has been taken with a grain of salt, however, particularly in Haywood where there’s evidence of Mission planting its own doctors in Haywood’s backyard to steal patients. Mission has also made offers to buy out existing doctors’ practices in Haywood.

Adams said MedWest is so obsessed with competing against Mission — even paranoid — that patients’ interests aren’t being put first.

“At some point the region has to decide whether they want a competitive or collaborative health care system,” Adams said.

What might look like collaboration to Mission might look like undermining local health care to others, however.

Ultimately, the board of directors for both Harris and the MedWest system have thrown their support behind the current model.

“The boards have essentially said the organization of MedWest is the structure they are committed to at this time,” Heatherly said.

Haywood doctors agree it is the best route forward.

“We think the best thing for our communties is to be under one umbrella serving our communities of Haywood, Jackson and Swain,” said Dr. Chris Catterson, a Haywood orthopedist.

What now?

While the call by Jackson doctors to withdraw from MedWest seems like a shot across the bow to their neighbors in Haywood, Jackson doctors said they didn’t intend it that way. They aren’t questioning the quality or caliber of health care at Haywood’s hospital or by Haywood doctors.

Simply, they don’t think Carolinas HealthCare — the major hospital network managing MedWest — truly has their best interest at heart. Carolinas, as the new variable in the equation, has born much of the criticism from the group of Jackson doctors.

Carolinas has 34 hospitals in its network. Some it owns outright. Others, as with MedWest, pay Carolinas an annual fee for its management services and the benefit of being part of a larger system.

Carolinas’ interest in MedWest goes beyond that annual fee, however.

The more patients it represents, the more leverage it has when bargaining for better reimbursement rates from insurance companies and the federal Medicare and Medicaid programs. Those reimbursements have been dwindling, and what insurance and Medicare are willing to pay often no longer cover the actual cost of providing the health care. Ultimately, that’s the driver in the consolidation of healthcare and jockeying for market share.

“They are playing the corporate practice of medicine,” Adams said. “I don’t want to be a pawn in somebody else’s power struggle and be used as a widget in a big business’ plan for their benefit.”

But that’s the reality, said Lauve, the health care industry analyst. Things won’t go back to the way they were.

“Be a part of the change instead of resisting or ignoring it,” Lauve said, encouraging physicians to engage in the process.

“If you believe the fundamental driving forces are not going to go away, the peaceful coexistence of yesteryear is not an option. You are ignoring the elephant in the room. You are saying ‘I just want to get in another five years until I retire,’” Lauve said.

There’s two strategies left: compete head-to-head or collaborate.

“If you compete, one loses and one wins, but even the winner is worse off five years later than all the systems you compare it to that chose to collaborate,” Lauve said, citing a case study by the Voluntary Hospital Association.

Or, “You can figure out a way to collaborate and be part of the system that rationalizes how care is delivered,” Lauve said.

Miriam Schwarz with the Western Carolina Medical Society said physicians would much rather be taking care of patients but have found themselves trapped in a microcosm of a much larger national debate.

“I think the fact that physicians are so isolated and don’t have the opportunity to communicate across county lines, that has exacerbated the polarization that has been created by the institutions,” Schwarz said. “All they know is what their institutions are telling them but haven’t talked to their counterparts to get the whole story.”

Schwarz said physicians across the region need to come together — rise above it all so to speak — and work collaboratively, something the Western Carolina Medical Society hopes to serve as the mechanism for.

Previously, the organization was known as the Buncombe County Medical Society, but a year ago, it changed its name to reflect its regional mission. It has 900 members, with 125 now from outside Buncombe County.

“One of the goals we have as a regional medical society is to cultivate physician-to-physician dialogue in a safe setting,” Schwarz said. “Hopefully, physicians can put aside the politics and institutional affiliations and the pressures that are put upon them by those institutions and really focus on excellent patient care.”

Two months ago, doctors from more than a dozen hospitals in the region came together for an all-day summit at a country club in Haywood County in hopes of bridging the divide. Schwarz said it gave her hope.

“When they are sitting across the table from each other, the posturing that happens when people are really afraid or concerns about how to practice medicine in this chaotic world melt away,” Schwarz said.

When a team of moving men showed up in the surgery suite of MedWest-Harris two years ago and rolled a specialized spinal surgery table out the door, down the hallway and into a truck, acting on orders to haul the half-million operating table back over the mountain to the hospital in Haywood County, news that Harris’ equipment was being raided by its sister hospital on the other side of the mountain spread like wildfire through the halls of doctors’ offices in Jackson County.

“That was one of the first inklings we had that Haywood was going to get preferential treatment,” said Dr. Randy Savell, a Gastrointerologist at Harris. “‘We’re taking from you and giving to your big brother.’ That’s how it came across.”

The hospitals in Haywood and Jackson were a mere three months in to a joint venture at the time. The premise: working together the two hospitals would be stronger than going it alone.

But, stripping the spine table from Harris’ operating room quickly became a large-than-life symbol of the struggle for Jackson County doctors to hang on to their autonomy under the new MedWest banner.

SEE ALSO: Caught in the crosshairs: Doctors struggle for footing in a shifting health care landscape

“That was a big dust up,” said Dr. Waverly Green, a pulmonologist at Harris. But he didn’t immediately climb on the anti-MedWest train.

“I think it hit different people at different times,” Green said. “Over the first year, it was like ‘Are they really trying to slight us and build up Haywood?’ Or are we perceiving a chain of events that way because of our own set of goggles we were viewing this from?”

From a different set of goggles, moving the spine table made sense. Harris didn’t do spinal surgery. It had no spinal specialists. Instead, neurosurgeons from Mission Hospital in Asheville would travel to Harris twice a month to see patients. If they needed surgery, the patient was almost always sent to Asheville — and Mission raked in the billing for the highly-lucrative procedures.

The spine tabled purchased by Harris aimed to change that, hoping that the right equipment in-house would convince the Asheville doctors not to merely hold office hours in Jackson County but to perform the big-bucks surgeries there as well. In reality, however, less than two dozen spinal surgeries were actually performed at Harris in a year.

Jump to Haywood, where two spine specialists had built a reputable practice during the previous five years. They performed 50 to 60 back surgeries a month.

After the joint venture, it only made sense to quit sending patients and money out the door to Mission and instead keep the business in the MedWest house. So the spinal surgery table was moved to Haywood where the equipment would be put to better use.

But for Harris, it cut off any budding aspiration that it, too, could perform spinal surgeries with regularity one day, not only for the revenue but to serve patients locally.

“That was a major product line we were trying to develop,” said Dr. Gilbert Robinson, an anesthesiologist with Harris for 10 years. “We were doing very valuable services for the community and they quit.”

To Jackson doctors, it begged the larger question: was Harris being set up as an ancillary hospital to Haywood?

For its part, the Haywood medical community does not perceive an underlying tug of war with Jackson but instead sees itself as equal partners.

“We want to have a great relationship with Sylva,” said Dr. Chris Catterson, an orthopedist in Haywood. “We want to help the whole system. That was our goal: to get bigger, to become more financially sound, and to grow. We want all of our hospitals to be successful. That is our goal for the future.”

Musical beds

While moving the spine table to Haywood became a metaphor for the issue, there were other perceived slights as well.

Faced with dwindling patient count, Harris had closed one wing of the hospital about three years ago, cutting down on staff and overhead to reflect the number of patients it was actually serving. But during spikes, when there were suddenly more patients on its doorstep than the reduced staff could care for, Harris had to turn them away.

Dr. Earl Haddock, a longtime cardiologist at Harris, said hospitals should be in the business of treating patients, not turning them away, especially in light of financial struggles at Harris.

“When someone calls to admit a patient, there’s two things you can say and that is ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Not ‘We don’t have any beds,’” Haddock said.

In reality, Harris had the beds but had maxed out its nurse-to-patient ratio for the night.

“There was no ability to flex. They had cut the staff back to the point they couldn’t take another admission,” Green said.

Meanwhile, it seemed Haywood always had plenty of beds, and the business was sent over the mountain.

While unfortunate, MedWest didn’t intentionally undersize staff at Harris so it could then divert patients to Haywood, according to Steve Heatherly, the president of Harris.

“Are there times when you get an influx of patients at a moment in time and don’t have the staff to handle it? Of course, that is an issue for every hospital,” Heatherly said. “There probably were times when patients were diverted from here to Haywood, and also patients diverted from Haywood to here due to availability of staff or physicians, but that is not part of any master plan.”

Harris now has a contingency plan in place to ramp up staff when need be.

All in the referrals

Allegations of ulterior motives aside, there’s an inescapable fact: Haywood’s medical community offers certain services Harris doesn’t. That was the case even before the MedWest venture.

• One of those areas is spine surgery.

• Another is advanced cardiology services, particularly diagnostic heart catheterizations. The procedure is advanced, but two heart specialists in Haywood perform them routinely. Harris doesn’t.

• A third service line Haywood has but Harris doesn’t is certain types of interventional radiology.

Historically, Harris referred patients needing any of these to Mission.

“People who were sick but not sick enough to need Mission we would handle. Anything we couldn’t handle, we would send to Mission,” said Green, a doctor at Harris.

Under MedWest, however, the question was raised: why not send them to Haywood?

“It was, ‘We don’t want you sending this to Mission if we can keep it in the system,’” Green said.

Legally, hospitals can’t tell doctors where to refer patients. They can ask, suggest and perhaps even gently implore, but they cannot strong-arm doctors into referring patients to a particular hospital or advanced specialist.

MedWest administration indeed asked Jackson doctors to give referrals to Haywood. According to some doctors, MedWest administration went a step further by tracking the referral patterns of their physicians, keeping spread sheets on the number and type of patients a particular doctor referred to Mission for things that could have been treated in system.

On the surface, it rightfully should be the administrator’s business to know where his corporation was losing market share and figure out ways to get it back. Jackson doctors, however, saw it as further evidence they were being asked to help prop up Haywood.

The Haywood doctors likewise asked their counterparts in Jackson — colleague to colleague — to send patients to them if it was something they could treat.

It’s possible the Jackson medical community couldn’t accept the notion that Haywood doctors could treat patients Harris couldn’t, and subconsciously, that’s why they bucked the idea.

That is not the case, however, according to Jackson doctors.

“If we are going to be true to our patients we want them to get the best they can get,” Savell said

Simply put, specialists at Mission do more of the procedures, and in the highly rare event something went wrong, the patient was closer to the emergency intervention they would need. And besides, after refering to Mission for years, they were simply used to working with the particular doctors on the other end of that radiology report or heart diagnosis.

Lonely at the top

As Jackson County doctors began scrutinizing management, attempting to detect whether favoritism was at play, it didn’t help that Jackson’s own CEO was let go when MedWest formed, and the staff at Harris began answering to the CEO from Haywood, Mike Poore. Poore had been promoted to oversee all hospitals under the MedWest system — both Haywood, Harris and Swain. Poore’s finance officer, chief operating officer and chief nursing officer from Haywood also took the reins over the entire system.

Poore’s home base was clearly Haywood, but he regularly made the 25-minute trip over Balsam to work from Harris, parking himself behind the desk of Harris’ departed CEO.

Accounts differ on exactly how much Poore and the other top leaders from Haywood actually made it over to Harris. Some say Poore was there at least two days a week. Whether its was merely their perception, Jackson doctors felt like they were being managed from afar, relegated to the status of a satellite hospital.

“All of a sudden we were saying ‘Gee, where is our representation here?’ The concept was ‘We’ll all be one big happy family, but that medical model didn’t work,’” Haddock said.

Likely, Poore was there more than they realized, based on accounts from one former employee who worked in a nearby office, but as far as Jackson doctors were concerned, their administration wing at Harris seemed empty more often than not. More than merely being irked by it, however, it actually made a difference on the ground, they said.

“If the person you need to ask a question of are in another county and have shown themselves to be unresponsive or aggressive, you don’t seek out help,” Savell said.

Push back from the Jackson medical community ultimately led to Poore being stripped of his position as CEO over MedWest and over Harris in February. Harris was given its own president, namely Steve Heatherly, who had served in various leadership roles, including chief operating officer, chief finance officer and chief strategist for Harris during the past 15 years.

Jackson doctors have responded well to Heatherly’s new leadership role and largely say they have confidence in him to help turn things around. Even Dr. Bob Adams, a spokesman for the disgruntled Jackson doctors, has given Heatherly his blessing.

“I think the WestCare board and Steve Heatherly are doing their best to work with medical staff now,” Adams said.

But, some doctors fear that the move is temporary and that once the Jackson medical community has been placated, Carolinas will return to the ultimate game plan: creating one flagship hospital with the other relegated to a supporting role.

“What does that mean three years or five years from now under MedWest?” Adams asked. “No one will ask the strategic question. Where are we going, how are we getting there and what does it mean?”

Meanwhile, Poore has resigned completely, announcing in early April that he would step down from his role. He has already landed a new job as a hospital administrator in Texas.

The Haywood medical community was dismayed by the news, believing Poore had done a good job and put the hospital on a trajectory for success and primed for a turn-around.

Since Poore’s departure, Carolinas has sent in its own John Young, the vice president of its western region, in a acting role as the CEO of MedWest. Young said few hospital affiliations are seamless.

“To bring different cultures together is always very difficult,” Young said. “But as sticky and difficult as these times are, we know that we will get through it. Organizations do work through these issues.”

By Steve Heatherly

At the April 16 Jackson County Commissioners’ meeting, a physician stated his concerns about the future of MedWest-Harris and MedWest-Swain. While some of the observations are correct, we disagree with the assertion that MedWest-Harris and MedWest-Swain have only two options in its future, failure or joining Mission Health in Asheville. 

Since the summer of 2010, members of MedWest management, CHS and some members of the MedWest-Harris and MedWest-Swain medical staff have participated in a dialogue that has resulted in changes that address concerns raised by physicians.  Specifically, a management team dedicated to operations at MedWest-Harris and MedWest-Swain was appointed in February 2012.  While no change in management structure can magically fix the challenges faced by most rural hospitals in America, and those specific challenges at MedWest-Harris and MedWest-Swain, our recent change has generated a favorable reaction by the vast majority of staff and physicians.  

As a bit of history, by 2010 Harris and Swain had experienced a four-year trend of losing market share, driven by the natural the ebb and flow of physician departures, resulting in constrained access to care within the communities we serve.  Patients increasingly began to seek care outside their local medical community. In 2008 and 2009, WestCare made a significant investment in the recruitment of more than 10 additional physicians which is likely responsible for arresting the descent of market share loss from 2010 to present. Now that we’ve had success in rebuilding our medical staff, we need more patients from our local communities using our local hospitals. Only then can we expect more positive financial results.

Our hospitals must confront the fundamental business reality that expenses cannot continue to be greater than revenue.  In the short-term, there has been rigorous evaluation of cost with a focus on ensuring that our labor expenses match our volumes.  Most position eliminations have come through attrition with the remainder coming through upward and downward flexing of staff to better match the number of patients in the hospital on any given day.  These adjustments are being made in close consultation with the Medical Staff and with our Departmental Leadership, with patient care as the centerpiece of every decision.

No organization can cut its way to prosperity, especially not a hospital, where quality patient care is our business. Thrive-ability will happen when more patients come through our doors to see our brilliant doctors and caring staff. It will happen when patients experience processes that are easy to understand and utilize. It will happen when it’s evident that our commitment to customer service can only be described as fanatical.

At least seven new physicians are joining MedWest-Harris and MedWest-Swain in 2012. Even in this less-than-optimal economic environment, we have expanded services to our communities through newly-constructed medical office buildings in Sylva and Bryson City. MedWest-Harris opened a wide-bore MRI and the area’s first urgent care center in August 2011. In addition, we have expanded upon our partnership with Western Carolina University with a presence in its new allied health facility which will open later this year.  

We continue to seek physician input with respect to our future. Within the past two weeks, we embarked on a process with Medical Staff leaders to focus on a shared vision and strategy for Harris and Swain going forward.  I am proud to report that there was unanimity around the idea that, whatever organizational structure within which our hospitals exist, our primary focus has been and must be to take great care of patients.  That focus has created the enduring legacies of Harris and Swain and is critical to our success.

In an organization of the size and complexity of MedWest, there will be diversity of opinion regarding most any topic.  This is no doubt the case in the present circumstance.  I believe it is the intention of the more than 1,000 employees at MedWest-Harris and Swain, its Medical Staff and management to use this moment as an opportunity to synthesize our diverse perspectives into an action plan aimed at preserving our hospitals as assets for the communities they serve for generations to come.  We look forward to an ongoing dialogue with the community, through a variety of forums, as we strive to accomplish the mission of our organization to provide high quality, compassionate, local access to health care.    

(Steve Heatherly is the president of MedWest-Jackson and MedWest-Swain.)

When the Med-West venture was coined two years ago, the premise was an easy sell. Together the hospitals would be stronger than going it alone.

Both Harris and Haywood hospitals had witnessed a troubling loss of patients to Mission — a loss so troubling in fact neither hospital could afford to continue as it was. They faced a cold, hard reality: turn the course, and fast, or they would be faced with financial insolvency.

Indeed, both hospitals hoped the MedWest joint venture would shore up the erosion of patients to Mission. Both, however, seemed to have different ideas of how that would play out on the ground.

Was there enough business for both to stay the size they were, or would one ultimately evolve into the big kid on the block under the MedWest umbrella — and if so, who?

Before the merger, and even now, Haywood and Harris competed very little. Fewer than 5 percent of patients from Jackson migrated to neighboring Haywood or vice-versa.

But with the future of their medical community on the line, 1 percent here and there suddenly seemed to matter quite a lot.

While the call by some Jackson doctors to withdraw from MedWest seems like a shot across the bow to their neighbors in Haywood, Jackson doctors said they didn’t intend it that way. They aren’t questioning the quality or caliber of health care at Haywood’s hospital or by Haywood doctors. Instead, it seems desperation amidst a shifting health care landscape has seized the day.

Next week: Read more about the specific concerns raised by Jackson doctors, an analysis of hospital market share, a snap shot of finances, and philosophical view points on the MedWest venture.

Four long-time physicians in Jackson County are leaving C.J. Harris hospital after becoming disenchanted with the direction of MedWest — and even more so with Carolinas HealthCare System, a giant network of 34 hospitals that MedWest is affiliated with.

Dr. Bob Adams, a hospitalist who is leaving Harris after 36 years, fears Carolinas plans to build up Haywood as a flagship to compete with Mission. He didn’t like where that would lead.

“Harris devolves and Haywood grows,” Adams postulated. “They are playing the corporate practice of medicine. I don’t want to be a pawn in somebody else’s power struggle and be used as a widget in a big business’ plan for their benefit.”

The president of Harris, Steve Heatherly, laments the loss of the four doctors — and the circumstances.

“It is unusual in the history of this organization to have physicians leave because they were not satisfied with the strategic direction,” Heatherly said.

Making matters worse, another seven doctors in the Jackson-Swain medical community have either already left or plan to leave — for a total loss of 11.

“It is unusual to have that level of turn over,” Heatherly said, even though only four of the 11 actually chalk up their departure to “dissatisfaction with the hospital.”

Lessening the blow somewhat, seven new doctors are moving to Jackson and Swain in coming months. They had already been recruited and were intended to bolster the physician ranks.

Now, however, the hospital will see a net loss instead of gain and a gap in a few key specialties.

Dozens of doctors, of course, aren’t going anywhere.

“We must not forget that we still have an extremely skilled and dedicated medical staff of nearly 230 physicians who are choosing to stay in our communities and work in our hospitals to take care of our patients,” Dr. Robin Matthews, an ob-gyn in Haywood County who chairs the Physician Leadership Council of MedWest.

Many of the 2,000 employees of MedWest have rallied to their hospitals’ defense during the past week.

“The hard decision is to stay here and fight for this place to succeed,” said Dr. Casey Prenger, the medical director of the hospitalist group at Harris. “We believe in our hospital and our community, and it is our privilege and honor to take care of you.”

There are huge challenges, however, facing Heatherly and MedWest: hold MedWest together, turn the corner financially, recapture market share from Mission, quell the doctor uprising, and recruit new doctors to fill the holes.

Resolving to make a stand

For the group of Jackson County doctors who went public with their concerns last week, the decision wasn’t an easy one nor was it taken lightly.

“They aren’t trying to hurt anything. They are trying to fix something,” said Dr. Gilbert Robinson, an anesthesiologist at Harris for 10 years.

Even those who spoke out aren’t certain now was the right time, or if it will do any good.

But, the ball was in Adams’ court. When he decided to go public, the core group who had been fighting alongside him during the past year to bring about change internally weren’t going to leave him on a limb by himself, so they reached out and grabbed on as well.

“I decided I wanted to let the community know what was happening to their hospital. The only thing that is going to change is if the community starts standing up for itself to Carolinas and the WestCare board,” said Dr. Waverly Green, a pulmonologist at Harris who is leaving as well.

Adams hopes the issues he raised aren’t construed as a parting shot or chalked up to sour grapes.

“They are portraying those of us who had concerns and discomfort about where we are as being disgruntled and outliers,” Adams said.

But in fact, hospital administration has gone out of its way to praise Adams and the others who are leaving.

“It is regrettable. They will be missed in this community. They are outstanding physicians who have provided years of service to this community,” Heatherly said.

Even doctors in neighboring Haywood, who rightfully have reason to be miffed by Adams’ shot across the bow at MedWest-Haywood, have been complimentary.

“He is a great doctor and wonderful human being. I just happen to disagree with them completely,” said Dr. Marvin Brauer, chief of staff at MedWest-Haywood and a hospitalist like Adams.

While Adams will soon be gone, others who support him will still practice at Harris and will continue carrying the torch to fix perceived problems.

SEE ALSO: Doctors take a stand out of fear for Medwest-Harris' future

Some of them are even on Harris’ payroll. Technically, the entity they are speaking out against writes their paychecks, putting them in an uncomfortable position at best, a vulnerable one at worst. Normally, few doctors would be willing to take a career gamble like that.

The difference at Harris likely comes down to their new president, Steve Heatherly. Heatherly has been with Harris since the 1990s, part of that time as a physician liaison and serving in a variety of vice president roles and as chief operating officer.

In hopes of quelling dissension among Jackson doctors, Heatherly was promoted two months ago as the president of Harris. It gave Jackson doctors one of their own at the helm — rather than the previous hierarchy where they answered to a single CEO for the entire MedWest venture, Mike Poore, who they were acutely aware hailed from Haywood and still had his base office there.

Jackson doctors have hope that Heatherly will help right the ship.

“I believe Steve is at the place he needs to be to help turn WestCare around, due to his experience and background and skill set. I don’t know of anyone else that would be better at this point in time,” said Bob Carpenter, a former MedWest board member from Sylva who resigned in January over the same issues troubling the doctors.

Even Adams agreed.

“I think the WestCare board and Steve Heatherly are doing their best to work with medical staff now,” Adams said.

Many doctors — even those who are in near lockstep with Adams’ pointed assessment of the MedWest landscape — wish he had given Heatherly more time to fix things before going public.

Dr. Randy Savell, a gastroenterologist doctor at Harris, said Heatherly faces a difficult future.

“He is between a rock and a hard place,” Savell said.

Heatherly’s boss is technically Carolinas, and he answers to them daily. But, he must also answer to the hospital board of directors, all the while winning the good graces of nurses and doctors by proving he will address their concerns.

The road ahead

Heatherly doesn’t downplay the reality that a hospital lives and dies by its doctors. If the doctors are good, people will get their health care locally.

“That leads to more volume through the hospital, which helps solve the business dilemma,” Heatherly said.

That business dilemma — dire financial straits for both Harris and Haywood — looms large in the debate.

Harris has lost more than 10 percent of its in-patient business to Mission Hospital during the past five years.

As a result, Harris is struggling financially and has been losing money for at least three years. It’s now in its third round of layoffs in four years.

“Our hospitals must confront the fundamental business reality that expenses cannot continue to be greater than revenue,” Heatherly said.

If the financial picture was rosier, the paranoia among Jackson doctors that Carolinas is trying to siphon its patients off to Haywood could simply melt away.

For now, Heatherly is stuck in a Catch 22. Rather than shrink, Harris must find a way to regain the market share lost to Mission.

“No organization can cut its way to prosperity, especially not a hospital, where quality patient care is our business. ‘Thrive-ability’ will happen when more patients come through our doors to see our brilliant doctors and caring staff,” Heatherly said.

Harris’ financial problems are largely because it lost several doctors back in 2006 and 2007, Heatherly said. When patients needed a doctor’s appointment, they were forced to look elsewhere and ended up walking right into the open, waiting arms of Mission in Asheville.

Heatherly, who started at Harris in the 1990s, had taken a hiatus for a few years to work for a physician management firm. When he came back to Harris in ?, job No. 1 was recruiting physicians to fill the void.

“The organization was having trouble recruiting physicians to replenish the supply to the local community, and it created a constrained access,” Heatherly said.

In 2008 and 2009, WestCare brought in 10 new doctors. It also bought out several private practices in order to put existing doctors on the hospital’s payroll — reflective of a national trend by doctors who increasingly prefer to work directly for a hospital rather than run their own private practices.

Those moves came at a financial cost, but Heatherly said the influx of doctors stopped the bleeding of market share. Unfortunately, it hasn’t come back up yet either.

“Now that we’ve had success in rebuilding our medical staff, we need more patients from our local communities using our local hospitals. Only then can we expect more positive financial results,” Heatherly said.

Heatherly’s belief in doctors as a core business strategy for the hospital seems genuine. He stresses it even when discussing other topics, like when the long-awaited renovations to Harris’ emergency room will be re-started.

“As we move forward, we have to assess that we have the right medical staff in place to offer ongoing appropriate access to care, and then those opportunities to evaluate facility expansion will be driven by the ability to generate sustained financial results,” Heatherly said.

Heatherly was speaking off the cuff, not reading from a prepared statement. But, his hospital administrator’s version of Alan Greenspan’s famous Greenspeak can be boiled down this way: doctors must be shored up first, which will bring back patients, which will bring back money.

Steve Heatherly made sure there were plenty of Diet Cokes queued up in the office mini-fridge before work Monday morning — he would need at least a dozen, probably more, to get through the next 24 hours.

Heatherly faced hundreds of nurses, doctors, lab techs, billing clerks, cafeteria workers  — anyone and everyone who works at MedWest-Harris hospital in Sylva — for a full day and night this week. Every hour on the hour, he repeated a short spiel laying bare the challenges and issues facing the hospital before turning the floor over to questions from a steady stream of hospital workers rotating through for the interactive marathon.

“In our current environment we felt like as quickly as possible I have the opportunity to interact with as many of our employees as possible in a very rapid succession,” said Heatherly, the newly promoted CEO of the two WestCare hospitals, MedWest-Harris and MedWest-Swain.

Heatherly likely touched on the challenge of competing for market share against Mission Hospital in Asheville. He allayed concerns that the hospital was struggling financially — at least not hopelessly so — but also charted a course for a better bottom-line.

Billed as a “frank and open dialogue,” Heatherly was bound to get questions about why he was suddenly put at the helm two weeks ago — giving Harris its own leader rather than sharing a single CEO with MedWest-Haywood as it has for the past two years.

The move signaled a retrenching of sorts following a pseudo-merger of the neighboring hospitals two years ago after they both signed a management agreement with Carolinas HealthCare System out of Charlotte. It is also a reflection of discomfort among some in the Jackson medical community about whether their hospital was getting the attention it deserved from a CEO based in neighboring Haywood County.

“Any time those type of administration changes come about, obviously people have lots of questions,” Heatherly said. “They are interested not only in the present but also the future.”

The epic, uber-long format was an effort to hit all hospital employees on every shift, bringing the whole staff up to speed at once but in the comfort of small group sessions — all the while keeping the round-the-clock operations of the hospital humming.

“He is a straight shooter,” Bunny Johns, the chair of the WestCare board, said of Heatherly. “What you see is what you get, and he will lay it on the line for you. I think it is a real talent to do that in a way people can hear it.”

For the record, Heatherly isn’t a big coffee drinker — thus the arsenal of Diet Cokes.

More ‘boots on the ground’

Meanwhile, Mike Poore has returned to being the CEO of MedWest-Haywood only. When the MedWest partnership was formed two years ago, Poore went from being the CEO at Haywood to being CEO of all three hospitals. But, that changed somewhat suddenly two weeks ago.

The stated reason: to give each hospital their own in-house leader that could singularly focus on the issues each location face.

“It makes sense for both of us to put more time into our individual organizations,” Johns said.

Things haven’t exactly been rosy for the Jackson medical community since the affiliation. Patients have been lost to Asheville. Revenues are down. The downward trend was already in play before the merger, an unfortunate combination of a doctor shortage in Jackson and the economy. But some doctors wonder whether the merger with Haywood has helped matters.

“It hasn’t gone down any more, but it hasn’t come back up,” said John Young, vice president for Carolinas HealthCare’s western region.

Several doctors apparently came to the WestCare board of directors with their concerns, thus the CEO shuffle that Young calls “more leadership boots on the ground.”

“I wanted to make sure the folks on the WestCare side of the system knew that Steve (Heatherly) had the authority to work with them to solve issues and win back market share,” Young said.

Working well with doctors

Heatherly isn’t a stranger to the staff at Harris. He has held various top positions at WestCare during the past 15 years. He spent a good part of his childhood in Sylva, went to UNC-Asheville, then got his MBA at Western Carolina University and a second masters in health administration from UNC-Chapel Hill.

He started out at WestCare in 1997 over a subsidiary company that handled physician management and billing and spent nearly a decade on the frontline of doctor-hospital relations.

Heatherly had worked his way up to second in command at Harris, serving as both the chief financial officer and chief operation office, when the merger happened. He was given a new title of chief strategy officer.

Meanwhile, however, the ranks of doctors employed directly by the hospital was swelling. MedWest now has more than 80 doctors on its payroll, a major change from the days not too long ago when doctors all worked in their own private practices.

Heatherly’s skills working with the physician community were tapped for a new position of CEO of MedWest’s physician network. He is continuing to serve in that role as well as his new role of CEO of the MedWest-Harris and Swain.

Heatherly has learned a thing or two about working with doctors over the years, and has occasionally been asked to share his insight.

The relationship between any hospital and its doctors — whether in private practice or employed by the hospital — can take many forms. Some are outright adversarial, and even the rosiest relationships have their share of tension.

“I think the pitfall for a lot of hospitals is if you aren’t fully engaged,” Heatherly said. “You really don’t even have to have active discord, but if a hospital and medical staff aren’t fully engaged then you run the risk of not walking in lockstep. Through no ill will, not being actively engaged can lead to a disconnect. You don’t always have to be in agreement, but the process of going through the dialogue is very, very important.”

That attitude could make Heatherly just the man to iron out concerns of Jackson County’s medical community.

“He is highly motivated. He is highly intelligent. He is well versed in medical systems,” Johns said. “He will bring a level of energy that is impossible to put down on paper.”