TCH ponders changes ahead

By BETTY RIDGE

With health care change coming faster than some would like, and not fast enough for others, Tahlequah City Hospital Officials are coping with issues as they occur.

During Monday night’s meeting, TCH Board of Trustees and staff members discussed a governance education meeting they recently attended.

Trustee Mike Watkins said speakers at the event stressed the quality of safety and value at hospitals, and the quality of care provided for the amount of reimbursement the hospitals receive.

“He [one of the presenters] asked what do you want the headlines in the newspapers about your hospital to read in 2025?” Watkins said.

The consensus among those attending was that the hospitals had searched their communities for all the chronic aliments and solved those problems profitably.

Hospital boards will be expected to be high-performance groups in the future, Watkins said.

He added that the experts cautioned them not to read all the proposed health care reform legislation; there’s just too much out there. Instead, wait and see what passes and what its impact on local hospitals will be.

The new emphasis will be on the value received for the money spent.

Dr. John Galdamez, chief of the TCH medical staff, said the conference was the most stimulative and informative one he’s attended in the past few years.

“It’s very clear that anybody with a mentality of five years ago, if they maintain that mentality, is going to fail,” he said.

This means a number of hospitals will fail if they don’t adapt, he said.

In the past, hospitals and physicians have often found themselves in two different camps, but that won’t work in the future, he said. New physicians today want employment, and that will often come through hospitals. They’re also more concerned with quality-of-life issues, Galdamez said.

And payment for medical services will be linked to outcome.

“If you don’t do a good job, you aren’t going to get paid,” he said. “The physicians and hospitals that don’t adapt aren’t going to survive. The physicians on our staff aren’t going to get their money directly from the feds. It’s going to come together, bundled, to the hospitals.” It then will be up to the hospitals to divide up the pay, he said.

Tort reform, a subject often discussed – especially by opponents to proposed health care reform measures – isn’t even on the horizon, Galdamez said.

“The hospital’s survival depends on how it relates to its medical staff and vice versa,” he said. “There is a brave, new world that’s dawning. If we don’t change, we become dinosaurs.”

Trustees also approved a number of agreements, including an operating agreement with Oklahoma Cancer Center Realty LLC that will involve lease-purchase and operation of the new $2.4 million cancer building project.