Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

Task force offers UMC reforms

A citizens group presented its recommendations to the Clark County Commission for reforming the financially troubled University Medical Center system Tuesday, but many of the recommendations are already in place.

Michael Walsh, UMC's interim chief executive officer, said many of the group's recommendations distill similar advice already presented and acted upon by four different consultants hired over the last year in an effort to stem losses at the public hospital, the state's largest.

"They really are an aggregate of internal recommendations and the recommendations from the four consultants," Walsh said.

County officials said that while some of the recommendations are already in place or will be soon, the work of the UMC Task Force was important. They saluted the 10 men and women who have worked for free since January to compile a comprehensive list of steps to take to bring the hospital system's financial house in order.

In December the County Commission was forced to contribute $38 million to cover the system's red ink. By February, the system was losing $3 million a month.

Since then, the county has trimmed those losses by two-thirds. Walsh said one of the most important tools provided by the task force was a matrix to analyze the cost and importance of providing services, including medical services at the main hospital and at the satellite Quick Care urgent care centers scattered throughout the urban area.

"We have done a little bit of work already using the matrix to evaluate individual Quick Cares," he said. "We'll be expanding it a little bit, looking at the social consequences of decisions. It's really a draft. We're still going to be refining it a little bit."

The task force recommended analyzing the relative costs and benefits on the fiscal side along with the social consequences of discontinuing or adding services.

"A lot of this stuff, it's in motion now," County Manager Thom Reilly told the County Commission, which accepted the recommendations from the citizens group with a 7-0 vote.

The report from the group includes 24 specific recommendations in 12 broad areas, including the hot-button issue of maintenance of the Quick Cares as a viable network.

William McBeath, president of The Mirage and chairman of the task force, said he also had a personal experience with one of the issues discussed in the group's recommendations last weekend.

Roy Horn's survival despite having his windpipe crushed in the jaws of one of his tigers in a Siegfried & Roy performance at The Mirage attests to the value of a central top-level trauma center, McBeath said. "We realize how important a trauma center is," he said. "I would hate to think in the incidence that happened Friday night if there were not the resources available."

Privately owned Sunset Hospital and Medical Center is planning to open its own trauma center. McBeath did not name Sunset, but said he fears that a duplication of trauma centers would split medical resources such as doctors and nurses.

Anne Lynch, a Sunset spokeswoman, said following the commission hearing that her company's plans to open a new trauma center early next year would not bring competition to UMC.

"I think it's providing access to quality care for everyone in our community," Lynch said.

She cited a temporary closure of UMC's trauma center in July 2002 as what could happen without alternative centers available.

"That really was a dangerous situation for our community," Lynch said.

Ultimately, the decision on what services to offer should be left to the company as a private institution outside of direct government control, she said.

Hospital officials, however, are worried that the competition of another trauma center would hit UMC's bottom line because it could draw paying customers away from the hospital. UMC now serves about 19 percent of the total population of hospital patients in the county, but half of the uninsured patients.

The increase in uninsured and indigent patients is cited as a primary reason for UMC's financial distress.

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