Former Head of Teaching Hospital : Director Is Named for Irvine Medical Complex

The former administrator of American Medical International’s teaching hospital in Omaha, Neb., will be director of the hospital chain’s 177-bed medical complex to be built in Irvine, AMI officials announced Thursday.

John C. Gaffney, director of AMI’s Great Plains Division and former executive director of St. Joseph Hospital, the teaching facility for Creighton University’s medical school, will begin developing the medical, administrative and supporting staff of the Irvine Medical Center while the massive $80-million complex is being built, according to Dr. Marvin H. Goldberg, senior vice president and director of AMI’s western division.

Ground breaking for the three-level medical mall is planned for late October, and the complex is expected to open its doors in August, 1988, AMI officials said.

Recent Takeover

Gaffney’s 17 years of experience at the 419-bed St. Joseph Hospital, including his relationship with the teaching faculty during AMI’s recent takeover, will serve him well at the Irvine Medical Center, which will have an affiliation with UC Irvine’s medical school, Goldberg said.

“We’re going to have a strong relationship with the (UCI) faculty” even though the Irvine Medical Center will not be the university’s primary teaching hospital, Gaffney said. (The university owns and operates UCI Medical Center in Orange but has affiliations with several other hospitals in the county.)

“Strong involvement of community physicians will be our key,” Gaffney said. But the Irvine hospital will develop specialized programs in conjunction with the medical school faculty, he added.

One of them will be the already-announced health center for women and children, including a fertility research and treatment clinic to be headed by Dr. Ricardo Asch, pioneer of an alternative technique to in vitro, or test tube, fertilization.

Asch developed the GIFT (Gamete Intra-Fallopian Transfer) technique, in which the woman’s eggs and the man’s sperm are injected into the woman’s fallopian tubes, where fertilization normally occurs. If the technique is successful, the resulting pregnancy continues as normal, with the cells dividing and multiplying, followed by the embryo migrating into the uterus.

Preventive Medicine

The Irvine medical complex also will offer a full range of preventive medicine and outpatient services, some of them geared to Irvine’s affluent, younger population, Gaffney said, adding: “That’s what the consumer is interested in.”

Gaffney, 46, was in charge of the financially strapped St. Joseph Hospital when AMI acquired the facility in November, 1984, the first takeover in the nation of a teaching hospital by a for-profit hospital chain. Caring for the poor--an important mission for the Catholic facility--did not suffer when the hospital chain took over, according to an article last year in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Gaffney enjoyed a good reputation with Creighton’s medical school faculty both before and after the takeover, Dr. Michael Haller, one of the article’s authors, said in a telephone interview Thursday.

“He was successful in recruiting the doctors to support the AMI proposal,” said Haller, who is associate dean for graduate medical education at Creighton. Before the takeover, St. Joseph was facing declining income and lacked the financial resources to purchase new equipment, he said. “If you’re an academic teaching center, you have to be on the cutting edge,” he pointed out. Gaffney knew that the hospital would not be able to sustain its mission unless new funding became available, and he won the faculty over to AMI’s plan, Haller said.

Now, more than a year and a half later, the medical faculty remains “skeptically optimistic” about AMI’s takeover, he said.

Goldberg said Thursday that AMI’s growing affiliation with medical schools is “an investment” in the highly competitive health care industry.

“We believe university centers are high quality and we will learn from them,” Goldberg said. Already, plans for the future Irvine hospital have sparked interest by the medical community that has spun off into new projects at AMI’s Medical Center of Garden Grove, he said.

Goldberg said AMI’s sharp drop in earnings in the last quarter and the company’s resulting cost-cutting moves will have no impact on the Irvine Medical Center plans.

“AMI’s commitment is absolutely the same,” Goldberg said. Almost half of AMI’s capital expenditures in the next few years will go to the West Coast, and the Irvine project will receive “the biggest piece,” he said.

Gaffney begins as Irvine Medical Center’s vice president and director July 21, but already a medical affairs committee, comprised 50-50 of UCI and community physicians, has been formed to recruit doctors to the staff and develop medical policy, he said.