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New boss sees more outreach at St. Luke's Elmore
Dr. David C. Pate, president and CEO of St. Luke's Health System, stressed to the hospital employees and the press Monday that St. Luke's intends to continue and enhance the community focus on health care.
His remarks came as Elmore Medical Center officially became a member Monday of the growing St. Luke's Health Service, a collection of hospitals across southern Idaho. The hospital will now be known as St. Luke's Elmore. New signs were already going up this week to reflect that change.
The hospital board agreed to turn over the assets of the hospital to St. Luke's in the belief that it would help improve health care service in the area.
Pate said St. Luke's already is looking at expanding the emergency room, which had been identified as a top priority in the merger discussions.
"We're committed to making that happen," he said.
Improvements in technology, such as rapidly transferable electronic medical records, will be coming soon as well.
And a lot of long-range planning, involving staff and the community, is going to begin with the greater resources of the St. Lukes group available to help.
Pate said that when the hospital board invited St. Luke's to consider adding the local hospital to its group, the main concern was about whether or not the two parties shared a common vision of community-based health care.
"It's not about growth (of the group)," he said. "If they hadn't shared our vision, we'd have turned them down." And even then, Pate said, the St. Luke's Health System board wanted two things -- a unanimous acceptance from the medical staff and a community vote of approval. Both of which it got.
Pate said the very model of health care is changing. "Right now, it's fee for service," he said. But if health care costs are going to be brought under control, "we need to get people healthy." As an internist, he typically treats people in the 40s to 60s. Often they are overweight and that leads to heart attacks, strokes and certain cancers. "What concerns me right now," he said, "is that toddlers in Idaho, ages 2-4, over 15 percent of them are obese. Imagine, if all the things I'm seeing now, we start seeing four decades earlier."
Pate said "there is a coming health care crisis. We can't be successful in lowering costs unless we start getting people healthy."
That doesn't mean laws that limit the size of soft drinks, he said. What it does mean is a shift in who is treated, how and when. "Right now, people in doctors offices are sick people. We need more people there who are just checking on their health status."
But what he really wants to do is "reach out to people, where they live and work, to help them make better, healthier decisions. If you want to lose some weight, for example, we need to have somebody there to help you get started. If you want to stop smoking, we need to help you with the tools to do it.
"But to do those things, we have to get out into the community where the people are, in their homes, their schools and their offices.
"We have to be responsible for care before they wind up in the hospital."
Individual patient needs and capabilities need to be factored in. For example, he said, typically, if a patient comes to the hospital with a case of pneumonia, they'll wind up in the hospital for a couple days. That can get expensive.
But it might be possible to let that person get well in their own bed, by setting up remote monitors and sending out a nurse a couple times a day to check on vitals and see how the patient is doing. With the patient's family there to help with the remaining support, the costs could drop dramatically "and the patient would feel a lot more comfortable in their own bed than a hospital bed," Pate said.
"That's the kind of thing we want to look at, to see if something like that will work."
Pate admitted that "trying to make people healthy is hard," if not impossible. But for those who want to make the choice to improve their health, they need to know there's a support system available to help, and "that's what we want to start building."
Still, some things will stay the same with the transition to St. Luke's Elmore. There will be no immediate changes in the Long Term Care Unit, for example. "We look at that as an important service," Pate said. He said if the hospital ever decided to contract out that service, it would be with the assumed goal of providing a quality product at a low price -- "something the community would embrace."
The hospital auxiliary has made the changes it has to make to its charter, and the hospital foundation is in the process of doing so as well.
Pate stressed that money raised locally for the hospital from groups such as those will stay local and be used only for this hospital. At the same time, he pointed out, there are some efficiencies the new St. Luke's group can bring to fundraising activities.
"Sometimes, all these different hospital foundations we have in the area -- and every hospital has one -- wind up competing against each other (for donations). We think we can streamline and straighten out that process. And we can make it more efficient. There's no reason every foundations has to have a separate computer system with it's own data base, for example. We can let one of our computers (and staff) handle all those data bases for each group. It saves a little bit and means more money winds up going where the donors want it to go.
"When a community raises money for one of our hospitals, we want to make sure that we're good stewards of that money. It should be spent wisely, efficiently, and stay local."