2B SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 1996
KU EDITION
LAWRENCE JOURNAL-WORLD
Med center travels road to recovery
- It was a year of rebuilding at the KU Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan.
BY ANDREW E. NACHISON
JOURNAL-WORLD WRITER
Rocked by controversy in 1995 executives at the Kansas University Medical Center are still working to shake the painful memories and lousy publicity - of a troubled heart transplant program.
But in the last year, Executive Vice Chancellor Donald Hagen has performed multiple transplant surgery on the teaching and research hospital, beginning an intensive internal review of operations and removing senior administrators linked to the inactive heart transplant program, which admitted patients but performed no transplants for 10 months in 1994 and 1995.
Glenn Potter, chief executive officer of the KU Hospital, resigned in October 1995, less than a month after state auditors concluded mismanagement caused the collapse of the heart transplant program, which remains inactive and is the subject of at least two pending lawsuits.
Then in November, Dr. Daniel Hollander, dean of the KU Medical School.
School,
resigned from his $253,000-a-year job,
although he retained a faculty appointment in internal medicine.
A permanent replacement for the dean's post hadn't been named by early August.
'Rebuild the Rainbow'
Besides the executive shakeup, Hagen spearheaded an intensive evaluation of staffing and management in an effort to streamline and modernize the medical center's operations, including a review of housekeeping, facilities operations, design and architectural services.
The medical center, at 39th and Rainbow in Kansas City, Kan., includes the university's Medical School, School of Nursing and School of Allied Health, as well as the KU Hospital, with a combined spring enrollment of 2,540 students. There's also a campus in Wichita with about 100 junior and senior medical students and a staff of about 300.
"We're going to rebuild the rainbow," said Dr. Hagen, the former U.S. Navy Surgeon General who started as commander in chief at KUMC in September 1995.
demand. This serves as a solid basis for the future."
One of my primary reasons for coming to Kansas was a national reputation for a strong academic base," Hagen said. "Our educational programs in each of our schools are consistently ranked among the nation's highest, and our students are in high
Like most university medical centers across the country, KUMC faces tough competition from nearby hospitals that don't have to pay for research and teaching.
"One of my primary reasons for coming to Kansas was a national reputation for a strong academic base. Our educational programs in each of our schools are consistently ranked among the nation's highest, and our students are in high demand. This serves as a solid basis for the future."
Competitive world
The situation has been exasperated in recent years by private insurers and government health programs demanding deeper and deeper discounts. Just who will pay for the overhead of teaching and research nationwide still hasn't been determined by government and healthcare leaders.
The university says the remaining 28 workers who lost their jobs were assisted in their other job-
Dr. Donald Hagen, executive vice chancellor of the Kansas University Medical Center
But one thing is clear; Academic medical centers will have to do their work more efficiently, with less overhead, meaning KUMC has to trim costs.
Irene Cumming, the unofficial acting CEO after Potter's resignation, was permanently appointed to that job in April. She joined the medical center in 1994 as chief financial and information officer, and in July 1995 added the title of chief operating officer.
In the past year 160 vacant positions have been left unfilled, mostly in administrative or support service positions. Another 48 yearly contracts weren't renewed, although 20 of those employees were offered positions with a newly created group practice for all of the hospital's physicians, Kansas University Physicians Inc.
Unrelated to the heart transplant troubles, the medical center also saw the arrival of a new dean of the School of Nursing, Karen Miller, who replaced Eleanor Sullivan after she resigned in 1995 to be a visiting professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
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efforts.
RENÉE KNOEBER/JOURNAL-WORLD PHOTO
Dr. Donald Hagen is completing his first year as executive vice chancellor at the Kansas University Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan. Hagen was surgeon general of the U.S. Navy before coming to KUMC.
As of this summer the medical center had 4,725 employees, making it the eighth largest
Susan Fry, the KU Hospital's chief operating officer, is leading
the re-engineering of the hospital. Hagen said the goal is a more cost-efficient, patient-friendly hospital.
Rethinking care
The medical center is now hiring nontenured doctors in addition to tenured faculty members in length in academic tradition.
"This will empower our faculty to focus on their strengths without being unduly pressured with the demands of the research labs," Hagen said. "The traditional tenure track will still be available to those with superior research skills or those who wish to develop these skills."
Hagen said even with the new nontenured positions the medical center will still be able to retain doctors who devote their time to teaching and patient care.
"We're going to aggressively move forward,building our educational and research programs," Hagen said.
To that end, the biggest grant in the medical center's history, announced in 1995, will help.
Dr. David R.Calkins, a Harvard Medical School faculty member, was named in July executive director of a new primary care physician education project. Among other things it will establish a network of primary care education offices throughout the state. Two are now being developed in Hays and Pittsburg.
The Kansas Health Foundation of Wichita awarded KUMC $15 million over five years to promote primary care medicine in the state. Much of the first year was spent organizing new primary care programs.
A $163 million bond package approved by the 1996 Kansas Legislature to pay for construction and repairs at universities across the state will bring $14 million to KUMC, some of which will be used to build a new nursing education building.
KUMC is also expanding efforts, such as outreach clinics, to care for patients in rural parts of the state.
Meanwhile, the hospital's doctors have organized into a single, multispecialty physician group.
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"This practice group is the largest in the Kansas City metropolitan area and the state of Kansas and will allow us to effectively compete in today's healthcare market," Hagen said. "Now we can speak with a unified voice for the physicians and hospital."
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