You have your Health Systems

Inevitably when I go on vacation some BIG DEAL newsworthy thing always drops when I have limited access to a computer. While I was away that BIG DEAL was the affiliation Letter of Intent signed between the Alameda Hospital and Alameda Health Systems which would make Alameda Hospital part of a larger “network” of hospitals.  Yeah, I know you all discussed it a bit over on the Elliott Gorelick resignation post, but this post has a timeline screenshot (oooOooooohhh).

It would be a relationship similar to the one that San Leandro Hospital had with the Sutter Health network until a deal was recently brokered — after a series of unfortunate events that left San Leandro Hospital with a dangling ax over its neck — to have Alameda Health Systems take over San Leandro Hospital.   Apparently that deal though has hit a bit of a stumbling block — should be resolved some time today — over $20 million (on top of the $22 million Sutter Health has agreed to pony up to keep operations going during the transition period) that would be required of their governing board.

Anyway, back to Alameda Hospital, so what does this mean for Alameda Hospital.   Well, one of the reasons why Alameda Hospital was doing so poorly was because it just couldn’t get enough people into its doors.   According to a press release from Alameda Hospital this affiliation will help generate more revenue by bringing in more customers:

Green light

In the “Wow, really?” files, last week Alameda Hospital Board member Elliott Gorelick probably best known for really really not liking the mere existence of the Alameda Hospital did the unthinkable and resigned from his seat as an elected boardmember.

Why he did it, who knows.   The first indication of his intent was posted on his personal blog last Tuesday:

EnTitled

On Monday (and I referenced it in yesterday’s post) John Knox White wrote a really great post addressing a rash of blog posts that Alameda Hospital Board Director Elliott Gorelick had recently put up about some fairly old business. Interestingly enough, Elliott Gorelick has since removed his posts, I have linked to where they used to be, but if you click through you may not find it.  Google Cache still has a copy of the posts, so I’ll link to those as well and have saved screen shots from the cached versions.

Let’s rewind a bit so that you can understand the full scope of the story. So last November Elliott Gorelick beat out Leah Williams for the third seat on the Hospital Board. Leah Williams had been appointed to the position and was technically running as an incumbent. Why she didn’t put “incumbent” as her title position I still don’t know. I personally think she probably would have gotten more votes had she gone with the “incumbent” designation as opposed to “Business Owner/Attorney” (or vice versa). But I digress.

Anyway, there were four people running for the three spots and Elliott Gorelick with his “Pharmacist” designation received that last spot. After losing, Leah Williams decided to file a whole host of complaints over Elliott Gorelick’s use of “Pharmacist” as his title on the ballot. She emailed a lot of people to publicize this and I believe she got little traction. I addressed it in this post and while Elliott Gorelick now characterizes that post as my saying that it was “no big deal” what I actually wrote was:

Masterstroke center

News that Alameda Hospital was back on Alameda County’s stroke transport list was a sign that Alameda Hospital’s Stroke Care Certification approval was imminent.

To quickly recap in November of last year Alameda Hospital was removed from the Alameda County stroke transport list.  What that means was that in an emergency call, unless specifically requested, stroke victims would be diverted to the closest Stroke Certified center.   Alameda Hospital began the process of becoming a Stroke Center and was added back to the transport list in mid September of this year.

Word was swirling that Alameda Hospital had now reached its goal and had recently achieved certification as a Stroke Center after an on-site review completed at the end of September.    I imagine this news will make some people happy and others not so much.

The transported

In the last Hospital Board packet there was a letter from the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency which noted that Alameda Hospital had been added back to the list of approved hospitals for stroke patient transport.  If you will recall, back in November-ish of last year, Alameda Hospital was taken off the approved transport list because it was not a Stroke Care Center as certified by the Joint Commission.

Alameda Hospital has been going through the process of getting certified and is nearly there — I believe they are on the site visit part of the process.   But at a certain point, for the County’s purposes, this is sufficient for them to consider Alameda Hospital as a certified stroke center.

The professional

So, as I started tracking discussion around Alameda Hospital (yeah, yeah…) I started wondering how Alameda Hospital staff felt about an elected Boardmember essentially calling the quality of service at Alameda Hospital “substandard.”   I mean, it’s one thing for a citizen with an ax to grind to say that the Hospital sucks, but it reaches a whole other level when a Boardmember does it.

Because, regardless how the critique is caveated by Boardmember Elliott Gorelick that he wasn’t talking about anyone or any service in particular, I imagine that it’s fairly hard to not take it personally when your professional abilities are being questioned and openly declared as not as good.   I mean, who wants to be told by someone who is speaking in generalities that you are doing a shitty job at your job?

Bigger isn’t always better

One of few critiques I have heard about Alameda Hospital — yes, that again, you are all going to be so thankful when the City Council comes back — is that because it is small that its smallness is why it cannot provide quality care.

In fact, Hospital Boardmember Elliott Gorelick expended a few blog posts randomly touting different reports of “say[ing] it better than” he could.  The brilliance of posting those excerpted quotes from various is that I doubt many people actually clicked through to read what the reports actually said.   In fact, when I clicked through to all the links, I was met with abstracts for the report rather than the whole report itself, with the exception of one report.   While this report’s conclusion was that:

Admission to higher-volume hospit als was associated with a reduction in mortality for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia, although there was a volume threshold above which an increased condition-specific hospit al volume was no longer significantly associated with reduced mortality.

Within the text of the report, they noted that:

Stroke care applied with tenderness

The nice thing about the City Council being on August break is that I get to write about topics that often get shunted to the side because the City Council issues are always seem to suck my attention away.    And again, my attention turns toward the Alameda Hospital.   It is a subject I am fascinated by because I don’t really have a strong feeling about whether it should stay open or whether it should close.   Selfishly, the closure of the hospital and stopping the parcel tax would probably benefit me more since I don’t use the Hospital and probably won’t use the Hospital, but there are a lot of services and programs that I pay for with my tax dollars that I don’t get the use out of either.

So I’m taking this opportunity to discuss the puzzling opposition by Alameda Hospital detractors and one Board Member to Alameda Hospital getting certification as a stroke center.   Right now, Alameda Hospital is not currently certified by the Joint Commission, an accreditation organization, as a stroke center, but it is in the process of becoming accredited.  There is a fairly rigorous set of hoops that must be jumped in order to be accredited by the Joint Commission, aka they don’t give these away in boxes of cereal.

Give me a sign

So I’ve been thinking a lot more about Alameda Hospital than I normally do.  Probably because the City Council is off on their August recess (eye roll) so there is not much coming down on that pipeline.

What has bothered me about some of the most vocal folks in favor of shutting down the Alameda Hospital is that they seem to want to do it from the inside out, rather they believe that it is up to the Board of Directors to elect to discontinue the parcel tax levy and vote to shut down the hospital even though — as I stated before — the voting populace of Alameda, whether they are property owners or not because owning property is not a pre-requisite to vote, voted to tax itself in order to have a hospital on the island of Alameda.   I don’t think that vote should be taken lightly, no matter how different the economic climate is today.

Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down

I don’t generally write all that much about the Hospital Board.  It’s one of those New Year’s Resolution type things that you promise yourself that you are going to try to do better at, like eating healthier or exercising or cutting down on caffeine.   You never really get around to doing it, but when confronted with a donut or a raucous City Council meeting, I always end up going for the donut.

But July’s meeting was extra special because the Hospital Board was going to vote on the parcel tax levy for Alameda Hospital.   For those that don’t know, every year the Hospital Board has to vote on levying the voter approved parcel tax to help fund the Hospital.   Every year, they do it.   This year they have Board member whose sole purpose of being on the Board is to attempt to shut down the Hospital and whose rhetoric around the subject has been slowly ramping up.