Great Press Dem article on hospital reopening in Tuesday's paper

[Peacetown Jonathan]

The PD does a great job getting inside the exciting reopening effort for Palm Drive as the Sonoma West Medical center today. Full article at:


Plan to reopen Palm Drive Hospital moves forward

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/3603464-181/plan-to-reopen-palm-drive

First third of article:

One of the first things you’ll notice about the future Sonoma West Medical Center are the new floors, revamped medical station, reconfigured patient rooms and donated artwork adorning the newly painted walls at the shuttered Sebastopol facility.

Less visible, however, is a plan to revive the former Palm Drive Hospital by making it into something much more than a traditional acute care inpatient hospital, a model that has failed twice, resulting in two Chapter 9 bankruptcies.Far more crucial than the sprucing-up currently underway is an effort to create “centers of excellence” in such areas as neurology, orthopedics and a brain and spine institute, to name a few. Think of a mini-Kaiser model where the hospital manages facilities, billing and collections, allowing doctors to do what they do best.

“We’re looking at it from a more entrepreneurial point of view,” said Gail Thomas, president of the Palm Drive Health Care Foundation, the organization spearheading the new Sonoma West Medical Center.“We basically came up with a model from the doctors,” she said. “The physicians said ‘This is what we would like.’

”The foundation and hospital supporters hope the centers of excellence will provide supportive revenues that will help cover the cost of traditional hospital services, such as inpatient medical-surgical services, the intensive care unit and the emergency department.

These traditional services on their own cannot compete with the county’s three major hospitals, Sutter Regional Hospital, Kaiser Permanente Medical Center and Memorial Hospital, said Ray Hino, CEO of the new Sonoma West Medical Center and the foundation. “We’re going to be enhancing revenues through the institutes,” Hino said Monday, during a tour of the construction work underway at the hospital.

Aside from the “cosmetic” work being done, Hino said the hospital is also going through a significant retooling designed to make the 25-bed hospital more patient friendly when it reopens in late April.That includes creation of a “no-wait” emergency department that relies on a four-station observation unit. That will allow for a more efficient flow of patients through the emergency department, Hino said.

The article continues here...

I made this comment on the PD bulletin board
Given a choice between a non-institutional, caring small Go Local hospital with a no-wait ER that builds upon Palm Drive's record of safety that Consumer Reports ranked #1 of all California hospitals, or a large city, institutional large insurance system hospital that treats you like a number and makes you wait for hours to be seen, I know which one I prefer!

Like tens of thousands of my neighbors, I am rooting for this innovative new effort to succeed. I voted for it to happen in November, I switched health insurer to get Western Advantage so I can use its doctors, and I will vote for it again when it opens--by using it, when necessary, and recommending it to friends and neighbors.