by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | October 20, 2017
From the October 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
We fund all our capital improvements off our own bottom line. The reason we’re expanding is because we continue to provide highly specialized services to people in our region and we have a strong demand for our services.
HCB News: What’s your patient mix?
GA: About a third of our patients have a cancer diagnosis, where we provide complex surgical and radiotherapy treatments as well as provide bone marrow transplants and immunotherapy trials. We perform over 350 organ transplants a year and manage the care for over 1,000 patients with end-stage organ failure. Our Regional Heart Center cares for patients with structural heart defects, congenital heart disease, or patients needing a mechanical circulatory device or heart transplant. We can care for up to 50 preemies in our NICU, and we have the second-most complex birthing mother mix in the country. We also provide comprehensive care for sports medicine, orthopedic and brain and spine patients.
We see more than our fair share of Medicaid and Medicare patients. Our proportion of charity patients now is small since most are covered by insurance expansion driven by the ACA. At the same time, we very much focus on patient experience and provide a great service that attracts the commercially insured patients.
HCB News: How many new positions are being created from the new expansions and how did you go about staffing up for those additions?
GA: It was roughly 120 positions to open all of the new units. We started about 18 months ahead of the openings of the new units to begin the planning. We reassigned bed capacity from other parts of the hospital and conjoining unit operations in a sense. We took staff from existing areas to help in starting up the new units and backfilled the existing units.
We forecasted the ramp-up of patient volumes and determined how many staff we would need to manage the workload. Working from that plan, we began hiring about nine months ahead, knowing our ICU staff would need at least six months of training to get up to speed. We also augmented with agency staff and per diem staff to smooth the bumps in the hiring and training cycle.
HCB News: What attracts staff to UW Medical Center?
GA: We’re in a competitive marketplace. While we have a national reputation, we still need to compete for talent against other excellent health care organizations locally. We pay at market level and have great benefits, but we’re not the top salary in the market. What brings people to us is the collaboration, the people they get to work with, and the commitment to the mission. Nurses and staff participate in the local practice councils. We’re also an innovation center. We are frequently initiating clinical trials where a new device or therapy first becomes available for patients. It makes it exciting and a fun place to work because we don’t do the routine.
