Dear Editor,
The Ellsworth American advocates greater cooperation among the three Hancock County hospitals. We wonder, why stop at the county line?
Blue Hill Memorial Hospital considered this question in a strategic planning process that began in July 2003 and concluded with a three-year strategic plan that was unanimously approved by our board of directors in March 2004.
Our planning process was extensive. We met with the leadership of Maine Coast Memorial Hospital (MCMH), Mount Desert Island Hospital (MDIH), St. Joseph Hospital – as well as Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems (EMHS) – to consider ways we could work more collaboratively. We met with Trish Riley, Director of the Governor's Office of Health Policy and Finance, to better understand the direction the state is taking with regards to healthcare. We solicited input from the community at meetings in Penobscot, Deer Isle, Stonington, Brooklin, Brooksville, Surry, Bucksport, Castine, Sedgwick, Blue Hill, and Orland. We listened carefully to a wide range of viewpoints.
We documented the growth rates of our communities – in some areas at the rate of over 20% per decade – and the rapid aging of our population, pointing to a need for greater healthcare resources in the future.
We considered the positive relationships that now exist among the Hancock County hospitals. MCMH and MDIH are fine community hospitals, with outstanding leadership and clinical staff. We value the collegial relationships we have with these organizations, which have led to significant cooperative efforts – for example, our successful joint recruitment with MCMH of a general surgeon and our continued efforts to recruit an ear, nose and throat surgeon.
We noted that both MDIH and BHMH already are federally-designated Critical Access Hospitals, which by definition are committed to limiting duplicative services, restraining costs, and focusing on the preventative and primary services necessary to serve rural populations.
The strategic plan we developed:
* Provides for meaningful and substantial collaboration among the Hancock County hospitals;
* Uses the specialist resources of the region's major medical center, Eastern Maine Medical Center;
* Points to EMHS as the most likely source of the resources needed to reduce cost and enhance quality;
* Ensures that BHMH will continue to provide our communities with access to healthcare of outstanding quality and personal attention close to home.
EMHS is a health system serving nine counties with the overhead structure and resources sufficient to support six hospitals and other health services. Entirely new levels of overhead, at great capital expense, would have to be created if the Hancock County hospitals merged – overhead that already exists within EMHS.
We recognize the need to reduce costs. From Fiscal Year 2003 to Fiscal Year 2004, we reduced our total operating costs by more than $400,000. We expect an EMHS affiliation will enable us to further reduce our expenses; three such examples are the cost of benefits, borrowing, and information systems.
We must also meet the challenges of the future. An affiliation with EMHS would permit us to meet rising standards of medical excellence, including the use of electronic medical records, which would reduce cost and improve quality, safety, convenience, and continuity of care for patients.
The BHMH and EMHS missions, strengths, and resources are complimentary, not duplicative. The BHMH mission is focused on caring for the communities we serve; the EMHS mission is to provide a network of local health care providers who offer high quality, cost-effective services to their communities. Our proposed agreement with EMHS allows us an unusual degree of autonomy and independence, preserving local control of our financial assets and our proud 80-year history of personalized care and compassion.
Mere adjacency is not sufficient reason to merge hospitals. An affiliation makes sense when there are complimentary strengths to be shared and concrete benefits can be demonstrated. We think the health of the communities BHMH serves would be advanced best by our proposed affiliation with EMHS.
Signed
Judith E. Thomas, Chair Stanley Bergen, Jr., MD, Chair
Blue Hill Memorial Hospital Foundation Blue Hill Memorial Hospital
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