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Local doctors invest to make new hospital a reality in Arkansas City

By FOSS FARRAR
Traveler Staff Writer
reporter@arkcity.net

Bob Yoachim says local physicians in Arkansas City are engaged in risky business.

They are investing their own money to build a new hospital two-and-a-half miles north of town. The hospital would replace South Central Kansas Regional Medical Center at 216 W. Birch Ave.

It's a risk worth taking, he added, because a new hospital will help the community.

"Our necks are on the block," said Yoachim, president of the local doctors' group, the Midwest Healthcare Alliance. "We need a new hospital."

The alliance has 15 physician-members and would become part owner of the new facility. MHA joined a Wichita-based group that builds hospitals, in roughly a 50-50 partnership.

The new hospital plan was on its way to becoming a reality by late March. By then, the Cowley County Commission had approved an "island annexation" allowing the City of Arkansas City to annex 168 acres for the hospital site. The county's approval was contingent on the city's agreement to pay some of the costs of upgrading and maintaining infrastructure near the site.

If all goes according to plan, Ark City could have a new hospital next year.

Yoachim said the MHA and Wichita group hoped to have construction on the new facility completed in the spring of 2007.

The replacement hospital would be a new entity, operated as a for-profit institution. The major owner would be the Wichita group, Cardiovascular Hospitals of America (51 percent) and minority owners would be MHA (48 percent) and the City of Arkansas City (1 percent).

SCKRMC is a quasi-public, non-profit institution, but the status of the proposed replacement hospital would change to a for-profit, limited-liability corporation.

Local doctors downplayed the change in status.

"It doesn't matter if you are for-profit or non-profit, you still have to make money to keep the organization going," said Kamran Shahzada, a member of the local doctor's group.

Yoachim and Shahzada said if the hospital continues to operate in its current 50-year-old facility, it might not be that long before it is forced to close.

Building a new hospital is the best way to keep adequate health care going in this city and the community, Shahzada said. Otherwise, the way the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements are declining, if one or two physicians were to leave the town, the hospital would not survive.

More funds are needed to continue updating equipment and paying wages to employees in the current hospital, Yoachim said.

"One of the original plans was to renovate the old hospital with the help of the city, for a cost of $25 million," he said. "That would be a direct liability toward the city, which we really didn't want to do. That's why we picked this option."

Yoachim said that SCKRMC is a hospital with a lot of good memories for many people, "but there's no way we could continue to operate that facility. But the new hospital would be viable for another 50 years."

The local doctors aren't invested in the project to amass a lot of personal wealth, a SCKRMC spokesman said.

"Our local physicians have their own funds committed to this project," said Clayton Pappan, SCKRMC's director of marketing. "If they weren't doing this out of a commitment to the community but just for money for themselves, they would have just opened an out-patient center or added to their own clinics."

Shahzada said that Arkansas City people should not be afraid that a new for-profit facility could fail and be forced to close.

"Actually, that's just a fear in the mind," he said. "Because the closing down of the current hospital is now actually a higher probability. You would need some sort of sales tax or other means for infusing some money. I don't think any small city is capable of doing that for a long time."

Shahzada said the new facility's location two miles north of town would change the demographics of hospital patients. It would expand the patient base to include the northern part of the county and surrounding communities, including Caldwell, Oxford and Wellington.

He added that a new state-of-the-art hospital is likely to draw additional physicians and specialists to the Ark City community.

"We are getting calls from new physicians, including an ophthalmologist, ear, nose and throat specialist and a surgeon," he said. "They are interested in looking at this."

With additional doctors and specialists, more local people would come to the new facility instead of traveling to Wichita or Ponca City for treatment, Shahzada said.

The management of the new hospital would be controlled by local doctors, representatives of both investment groups said.

The facility would have an eight-member board of directors -- four members from MHA, three members from CHA and one non-voting representative from the City of Arkansas City.

"We like to see physicians in the driver's seat," said Adib Farha, executive vice president of CHA. "They know what's best for the patients they serve."

CHA was established in 2002 to build hospitals based on a model initiated by Badr Idbeis, a physician and the chief executive officer of CHA.

"Dr. Idbeis had experience in building and designing two specialty hospitals in Wichita -- the Kansas Heart Hospital and the Kansas Spine Hospital," Farha said. "He was the lead developer in these projects."

He developed the model he had used in building Kansas Heart Hospital, which he co-founded, to establish CHA, Farha said. It was expanded for a general hospital model.

"We are building a hospital in Hammond, Louisiana, and have another hospital project in California and one in Kentucky," he said. "CHA is acquiring two major hospitals in Honolulu. We are acquiring them to turn them around, and we also have various international projects."

Proposed Hospital

South Central Kansas Regional Medical Center plans to break ground on a 60,000 square foot replacement hospital in the spring of 2006. The completion of the new facility will bring several advantages to the area's medical community and as well as overall patient care.

* 24 private, acute patient rooms

* State-of-the-art, single story design combines staff efficiencies and patient convenience

* Five-bed intensive care unit includes a negative pressure isolation room

* Six-bed obstetrics wing features a private waiting area and four family birthing suites

* Advanced technology radiology unit offers the area's most progressive imaging options

* Centralized operating rooms for private and convenient inpatient/outpatient surgery

* On-campus medical office building houses several physicians and medical specialties

The History

The SCKRMC replacement facility plan has continued to develop since the mid 1990s. The original plan was to expand and renovate the current facility.

In 2000, the project's architect presented to the board of trustees the initial plan for the hospital renovation.

The plan was eventually rejected by the board following a feasibility study that helped determine the construction costs of renovating as compared to the construction costs of building an entirely new facility.

The Land

Once the decision had been made to move forward with the replacement facility, its location had to be determined. Several locations were considered until December 2001, when Don and Wilda Patterson donated 168 acres of farm land for the project.

The land is located two miles north of the current Arkansas City city limits, along Highway 77. The entire 168 acres were island annexed to the City of Arkansas City at the request of the medical center. Initially, 35 of the 168 acres will be developed.

The Name

The partnership between CHA, the local physicians and the current hospital will form CoVista Medical Center. A name that was chosen to represent the cooperative vision it has taken to get the project to these final stages.

Above: Bob Yoachim is one of the doctors investing in the new hospital planned north of Arkansas City.