Valley hospital on the road to health
Published 12:03 pm Thursday, October 2, 2008
SNOQUALMIE – After a hard year of setbacks for the Snoqualmie Valley Hospital, its superintendent has said the dust is starting to settle and it is being swept away for a new future.
“We’ve come a long way in three months,” said Alan MacPhee, interim superintendent at the Snoqualmie Valley Hospital.
Running the Snoqualmie Valley Hospital has historically been a hard task (the hospital closed twice since it opened due to financial problems), but the last year proved to be one of the hardest. Last November, a broken boiler caused the hospital to temporarily shut down and a weekend with no directive to boil water during an E. coli outbreak caused facility and communication issues to surface.
The hospital’s staff vented to the hospital district board about the disrepair of the facility and the lack of communication with the administration. Jeff Lyle, the superintendent who had gotten the hospital reopened and back on its feet after being closed for a second time, resigned in December.
“We didn’t conduct business the best way we could have,” MacPhee said. “We have been addressing those issues and getting them fixed.”
MacPhee, who was the chief financial officer under Lyle, was named interim superintendent. The first task MacPhee set for himself was to fix the facility. In the past four months, MacPhee said he has spared no expense to fix the hospital’s wiring, air conditioning, heating system, medical gas systems and alarms as well as the infamous boiler. He has repainted whole wings of the hospital, bought art work for the hallways and installed televisions in patient rooms. Some medical equipment that gave the hospital some difficulty has been replaced and MacPhee said the hospital is preparing to have some of the best X-ray services in the area, including a mobile MRI and CT scan that will visit the hospital.
Developing and implementing a viable business plan was the second task on which MacPhee worked. With expansion plans in Issaquah, Swedish Medical Center and Overlake Hospital Medical Center are widening their reach on the Eastside, but MacPhee believes there is still a place in the Snoqualmie Valley for the hospital. The Mount Si Senior Center is planning to open a 40-bed assisted living home on the hospital’s campus, which will allow it and the hospital to share some facilities. While the hospital is not guaranteed any patients from the facility, MacPhee said the hospital hopes its location will cause it to be a natural choice for the residents.
The urgent care facility is staffed 24 hours-a-day, seven days-a-week and MacPhee hopes the hospital can one day upgrade the facility to a full-fledged emergency room. He wants to reactivate the helicopter pad on the campus and bring in more special ists.
“Within two years, this facility could be profitable,” MacPhee said.
MacPhee said he has been working hard to re-establish relationships with local primary care providers. The trend in health care has been for physicians to send their patients to hospitals to see specific doctors when they need more acute care. These doctors, called hospitalists, can be hard to get and MacPhee has been looking to hire more after two hospitalists left in the last couple of months. Moreover, winning the trust of doctors to send their patients to a new hospitalist can be difficult, especially already established a relationships.
“It’s a struggle and a battle, but it’s something you can win over time,” MacPhee said.
MacPhee said all the upgrades are necessary to offer a product people will be willing to pay for. With Swedish and Overlake planning to expand their services further east, MacPhee said now is the time to build up the hospital’s services so it has something no one else will be able to offer the Valley for some time.
“We have a window of where we can demonstrate what we can do,” MacPhee said.
One of the changes at the hospital will be MacPhee himself. Earlier this month he announced that his last day at the hospital would be May 7. He will be taking a job in Leavenworth that is an hour closer to his home in Quincy. Hospital Board member Dick Jones said there was no ill will with MacPhee.
“It wasn’t like the board didn’t want him,” he said. “Alan did a good job as acting superintendent.”
In the future, Jones said the hospital will be run with more of a management team approach as opposed to a one-man hierarchy. He said the board will be working to keep communication open with the hospital staff and administrators so there are no surprises.
“The board can’t be in the dark,” Jones said.
The board recently voted to also extend talks with Overlake, a hospital that has provided various administrative services to the Snoqualmie Valley Hospital in the past. Overlake President and Chief Executive Officer Ken Graham said the talks have been confidential but there should be an announcement by June of what kind of services, if any, Overlake will offer in Snoqualmie.
“We are in talks with Snoqualmie and we are hoping something can work out,” he said
Jones said the board hopes to appoint an interim superintendent at its next meeting on April 26. After that, the board will start a full search for the next hospital superintendent. Whomever the superintendent is, Jones said he is optimistic about the future.
“We’re feeling really positive,” he said.
