Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Clark County mulls new partner, role for UMC

Tired of University Medical Center’s massive debt and indignant at the lack of respect the public hospital has received from the state’s medical school, Clark County commissioners decided today to look more deeply at turning it into an academic medical center.

It was apparent from commissioners’ questions such a partnership may involve an expansion of the hospital’s relationship with the University of Nevada School of Medicine.

“What if the School of Medicine (in Reno) isn’t the one that wants to partner?” Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani said.

“Unresolved is the candidate,” to become UMC’s partner, replied Harry Hagerty, a member of the relatively new Hospital Advisory Board.

At the advisory board’s March meeting, it was noted that in many states where the major population center had shifted away from the capital, “the (medical) school moved to the major population center.”

Nevada’s capital is Carson City, with 55,000 residents. The 2 million living in Clark County dwarfs Washoe County’s population of 421,000.

Cliff Stromberg, a representative of FTI Consulting, said that doesn’t mean anyone should seek to close the Reno medical school. But more medical school buildings should be built in Clark County.

Commissioners also directed the advisory board to whittle down a large report on different operational models UMC could pursue and focus on fashioning UMC into a “public benefit” hospital that can operate both as a public and private institution.

A spokesman for the Service Employees International Union, which represents many UMC workers, expressed support for the public-benefit hospital notion. Via telephone, Stromberg said that public-benefit models “are what the leading, smartest institutions are thinking about.”

Some commissioners, however, said they were leery of any model that might reduce public scrutiny.

“Don’t lose sight that we are there to care for everybody in the county, regardless of their ability to pay,” Giunchigliani advised.

Although some public-benefit institutions may avoid the public scrutiny of hospital board meetings, Stromberg said that does not have to be the case. It would be up to commissioners to pick and choose which aspects of it might work best and ignore the rest.

Rationale for the different governing option stems from the “competitive disadvantage,” as Commissioner Steve Sisolak put it, that comes from operation as a strictly public hospital. If UMC, for instance, is trying to develop plans to market or improve some area of care, Las Vegas’ private hospitals know about it because they have the right to attend meetings where those decisions are made.

“Burger King isn’t in meetings of McDonald’s,” he said to exemplify competition among local hospitals. “But I don’t see how (as a public institution) you get around that.”

All of the ideas will be debated, Hagerty assured, before recommendation is made. “We don’t want to move forward at a foolish pace,” he said.

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