Private Hospital to Open Clinics in Ventura, Oxnard : Medicine: The new facilities will compete with the county’s public health agency for low-income patients.

A private Ventura hospital plans to soon open its first two community clinics to compete with Ventura County’s public health agency for low-income patients.

The clinics will open in north Oxnard and central Ventura within two months, representing Community Memorial Hospital’s first major effort to lure Medi-Cal patients, administrators said.

“We’re in a time of tumultuous change,” hospital Executive Director Michael D. Bakst said. “We need to reach out to the community in this new competitive health care market.”

Community Memorial still operated at a profit last year. But a cost-cutting trend within the health care industry meant that 43% of the hospital’s beds were empty on average, a sharp drop that has led to elimination of about 40 jobs, Bakst said.

In addition, Bakst said that Ventura County’s aggressive expansion of its public clinic and hospital system threatens to pull privately insured patients out of Community Memorial.

Community Memorial has already lost patients to the county hospital because of a 1993 change in the county’s employee insurance plan, Bakst said. Nearly 1,000 employees have opted for low-cost treatment at the county hospital and its clinics, officials have said.

Community Memorial’s new clinics--one scheduled to open by the end of the month and the second in early April--are needed to make up for lost patients and revenue, Bakst said. The new clinics will qualify for maximum Medi-Cal payments because they will offer special classes and services for pregnant women and new mothers, he said.

While designed for outpatient care, the new clinics would also funnel patients into Community Memorial and help the hospital make greater use of its expensive diagnostic equipment such as CAT scanners and a $2.6-million Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine, Bakst said.

Phillip K. Wessels, head of the county Health Care Agency, said he welcomed Community Memorial’s competition for low-income patients.

“I can’t object to the competition,” Wessels said, “because competition makes you do a better job. And in the end, the one that provides the best services will be the one that captures most of the patients.”

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Wessels insisted that the county has no plans to compete with private hospitals for patients with private insurance. The county has no state license to run a health maintenance organization, and by law can offer health care only to the poor and its own employees, he said.

“It is not our current plan to compete with the private sector,” he said. “That is the perception, but that is not our intent.”

At the same time, however, Wessels hinted retaliation if Community Memorial takes away so many Medi-Cal patients that it financially undercuts the county hospital and clinics.

“If they’re going to be successful in capturing our Medi-Cal market then we may have to rethink our position about the private insurance market,” Wessels said. “We have to maintain the financial viability of our hospital.”

For years, Community Memorial has treated relatively few Medi-Cal and indigent patients, which make up the bulk of those cared for at the county hospital three blocks away.

But over the last six months, Community Memorial has signed its first Medi-Cal contract and now has announced a two-year lease on a 3,700-square-foot clinic at Carriage Square in north Oxnard. A second lease on a clinic near the central Ventura hospital is also being negotiated, Bakst said.

The hospital’s goals--in addition to responding to industry change and replacing lost revenue--was to fulfill its commitments to Medi-Cal to treat more poor patients, Bakst said. “The purpose is to assure accessibility of our service to Medi-Cal patients,” he said.

Historically about 5% of Community Memorial’s patients have been covered by Medi-Cal, whose payments are generally very low but are substantially higher for doctors or hospitals with large numbers of Medi-Cal patients.

Bakst said Medi-Cal patients will come to his hospital’s new clinics “because it’s private sector. People may prefer that as opposed to the public sector. It’s freedom of choice.”

Whether Ventura County really needs more private clinics serving the poor is questionable, Wessels said. “I don’t think it’s a tremendously compelling need,” he said.

Wessels cited a new study by the California Assn. of Public Hospitals that shows the Ventura County Medical Center and its clinics serve a higher percentage of total Medi-Cal patients than any other county in the state.

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About 77% of all Medi-Cal hospital patients in this county last year stayed at the county hospital, while 83% of Medi-Cal patients seen at clinics were treated at county facilities.

Over the last four years, Ventura County has expanded its services by opening new public clinics operated by doctors as semi-private businesses. New public-private clinics have opened in Ventura, Oxnard, Santa Paula and Simi Valley. Another is scheduled to open soon in Thousand Oaks.

Since the change, outpatient visits in areas where old-styled county clinics existed--Oxnard, Santa Paula and Ventura--have more than doubled to 66,560 a year, Wessels said. And large operating losses have been replaced by substantial profits, he said.

The greatest unmet need by poor county residents could be in the La Colonia area of Oxnard, Wessels said. The area is within a mile of Community Memorial’s new Oxnard clinic.

“We may open up another one in south Oxnard,” Wessels said. “Maybe in Colonia.”