WWW arkcity.net

By FOSS FARRAR
Traveler Staff Writer

Local doctors spearheading a plan to build a new hospital for Arkansas City said Friday they are risking a lot of their own money on the project because they believe it will help the community.

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

The 15 doctors have formed a group called Midwest Healthcare Alliance that would become part owner of the new facility. MHA has joined a Wichita-based group that builds hospitals, in roughly a 50-50 partnership.

The plan is under consideration by the city, the current hospital owner.

City officials, who are leaning toward supporting the project, are expected to vote on an agreement with the investor groups at next Tuesday's City Commission meeting.

According to the agreement, the city would turn over the assets of the current hospital, South Central Kansas Regional Medical Center, to the investors once the new facility is built.

If that happens, Ark City could have a new hospital next year.

"The groundbreaking on our timeline is at the end of March, and hope to finish (the new facility) in May 2007," Yoachim said.

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 downplay 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.

"This (building the new hospital) is the best way to keep the 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 will leave the town, the hospital will 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. They would have taken their (investment) out of the local hospital."

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 (project)."

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."