Kaiser to Send Sickest Patients to St. Vincent
In a major break with tradition, Kaiser Permanente said Thursday that it will start sending its sickest patients in Southern California to a Catholic-owned private hospital near downtown Los Angeles in mid-1997 instead of to its flagship Sunset Boulevard medical center.
The move, which will lead to the closure of the hospital on Sunset, is Kaiser’s most aggressive yet to cope with cutthroat competition in Southern California by reorganizing a sprawling health-care system that serves more than 2 million members in the region.
Executives said Kaiser Sunset and St. Vincent hospitals are both underused, with more than half of their beds empty on the average day. Kaiser also said the 40-year-old Sunset facility needed expensive renovation to meet earthquake safety standards.
Under a preliminary agreement between Kaiser and Catholic Healthcare West, Kaiser plans to transfer its inpatient operations from the Sunset hospital to St. Vincent Medical Center beginning in mid-1997. St. Vincent is owned by Catholic Healthcare West, a not-for-profit hospital chain with headquarters in San Francisco.
The move will eventually affect 1,500 Kaiser employees, many of them union members, at the Sunset facility. “It’s not yet clear what the impact on employees will be,” said Hugh A. Jones, a Kaiser executive vice president, adding that the health maintenance organization will have to negotiate the changes with its unions.
“St. Vincent has organ transplant, cardiac surgery and cardiac catheterization programs,” Jones said. “It’s a fortuitous blending of our needs for resources and their availability” at St. Vincent.
The Sunset hospital is Kaiser’s main tertiary care facility for Southern California, where the most complicated surgical procedures, such as cardiac surgery, are performed for Kaiser members throughout the region.
If the deal is completed, the principal effect on Kaiser members would be hospitalization at St. Vincent rather than the Sunset hospital. St. Vincent is a leading center for cardiac, cancer and multi-organ transplant programs.
Kaiser executives stressed that members who are sent to St. Vincent would continue to be treated by Kaiser doctors.
Kaiser said it will continue to provide non-hospital care at the Sunset site, such as doctor’s office visits and outpatient surgery, after the hospital is closed to surgical patients. About 350,000 Kaiser members are treated at the center’s outpatient clinics annually.
The fate of the hospital buildings, which comprise two of 12 buildings at the sprawling Sunset site, has not been decided.
In a related announcement, Kaiser said it has agreed to turn over its empty Baldwin Park Medical Center to Catholic Healthcare.
The hospital, completed several years ago and touted by Kaiser as its “hospital of the future,” never opened its doors because Kaiser membership in the San Gabriel Valley did not grow as expected. The Catholic hospital group said it will open the hospital to both Kaiser members and other patients by early 1998.
As marketplace competition among HMOs has intensified, Kaiser has gradually loosened its decades-long tradition of sending its California members only to Kaiser-owned hospitals. In Northern California, San Diego and Orange County, Kaiser already sends members to private hospitals for certain medical services.
Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Healthcare Assn. of Southern California, said the central Los Angeles area has twice as many hospital beds as it needs.
Lott said the addition of Kaiser patients at St. Vincent could improve the quality of health care by increasing the frequency of surgical procedures performed at the hospital. There is ample research showing that hospitals that perform surgical procedures most frequently--heart surgery, for example--have better medical results.
