Doctors’ Group Hopes to Cure Ills of Ailing Hospital in Burbank

Doctors at Burbank Community Hospital may oversee the board room as well as the examining room as a result of a lease agreement reached this week with the nonprofit foundation that owns the facility.

Hoping to reverse three years of financial losses at the hospital, a partnership of 19 doctors agreed Monday to lease the facility and operate it by installing its own board of directors if the physicians can raise enough money.

The lease agreement--approved Monday by hospital staff members and trustees of the Burbank Community Hospital Foundation by a 35-9 vote, with three abstentions--is part of a new financial strategy that will include an increased emphasis on outpatient care, hospital officials said.

“We’re in a transition,” hospital Administrator William Daniel said. “We want to take advantage of our small size and our location in the community” by increasing the proportion of hospital business devoted to outpatients, who provide the hospital with higher profits, from 25% to 50%.

“It’ll be more of a medical mall,” said William Swanson, a family practitioner and treasurer of the physicians’ partnership, called Doctors Hospital of Burbank Ltd.

“We’re going to change the identity of the hospital,” Swanson said, adding that the doctors might add new facilities, such as a medical supplies shop. “The inpatient population will be less important in the future.”

The lease will not take effect until the physicians’ group raises between $600,000 and $700,000, half the amount the hospital foundation believes will ultimately be needed, Daniels said.

The group needs about two months to increase its size to about 50 partners, each of whom will contribute between $10,000 and $20,000 to the lease fund, he said.

The physicians’ partnership will allow any of the approximately 150 doctors entitled to practice at Burbank to invest in the fund.

The partnership will try to attract a balance of physicians from various medical specialties, Daniels said.

The doctors are discussing whether to change the name of the hospital and whether the physicians’ group will operate on a nonprofit basis, Swanson said.

Although some members of the hospital staff grew frustrated with the length of the negotiations, there is “an upbeat mood now,” Swanson said.

Burbank Community Hospital is licensed to operate 105 beds, but because of low demand has only 65 prepared for use, Daniels said.

Of those, only about half are occupied.

The hospital’s falling revenues over the past three years are due partly to general medical trends, such as shorter periods of patient hospitalization and increased cost-consciousness by insurance companies, Daniels said.

Also, nearby St. Joseph Medical Center provides continuing competition, and a 1987 investigation by the county health department into the deaths of five indigent patients gave Burbank Community Hospital a poor reputation.

No criminal charges were filed, but “the publicity severely damaged the hospital and further decreased its utilization, which has hastened the day we need to take it over,” Swanson said.

The investigation dealt with doctors who no longer work at the hospital, Swanson stressed.

But the physicians who will lease it hope that by assuming control of hospital policy themselves, they will expedite decision-making and further improve patient care, he said.