Word: wichitas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Kevin Conlin has a problem. Physicians in Wichita have been catching a bug. An entrepreneurial bug. One that compels them to build highly specialized hospitals, diagnostic imaging facilities stocked with next-generation scanners, and same-day surgery centers that have hotel-like touches. Conlin, CEO of the $1.2 billion nonprofit Via Christi Health System in Kansas, complains that these outfits are competing unfairly against St. Francis and St. Joseph, his two general hospitals in Wichita. And he intends to do something about it. Via Christi provided Kansans with some $30 million in charity care and $33 million in unpaid...
Kansas Heart triggered a cascade. This quiet, airy city of 540,000 already had--besides Via Christi's hospitals--the Wesley Medical Center, part of the for-profit HCA chain. Wichita now has five doctor-owned hospitals as well, along with a dozen ASCs and at least 10 free-standing diagnostic imaging centers, eight of which have physician investors. (Via Christi has a share in four of them, as it does in one ASC and a specialty hospital.) "The fear that emergency rooms and cardiovascular programs would close at community hospitals," says Duick, "has not been borne out over seven...
...competition fair? Within two years after Galichia Heart Hospital opened in Wichita in 2001, Wesley's net revenues from its cardiovascular program plummeted from a notch above $18 million to roughly $2 million. In 2003 the Kansas Spine Hospital opened, and in a year Wesley's neurosurgery revenues dropped $8.8 million, to roughly $1 million. Via Christi cardiovascular surgeries declined from 4,334 in 1998 to an estimated 2,950 this year. In that period, its executives say, the number of nonsurgically treated cardiac patients--who, say, have heart failure--remained relatively steady, around...
...subtle ways. Some won't let an ASC physician-investor admit patients in their wards. And powerful health systems often use their leverage to lock physician-owned competitors out of preferred networks of insurers. Via Christi owns Kansas' largest managed-care plan; Wesley has an exclusive contract in Wichita with the state's leading insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield. "It's brutal competition," says David Laird, CEO of the Heart Hospital of Austin, which competes with the Texas nonprofit Seton Medical Center. "They act like they have a halo over their heads...
...moment of truth: Gordon Goodwin is a seventh-grader in Wichita, Kans. He listens to his first Count Basie record, The Queen Bee. Even though he has never heard Big Band jazz before, it hits him like something he has always known. He thinks, "That's it. That's going to be my life." And for the next three decades or so, it is--sort of. After studying music in college, he becomes a busy pianist, saxophonist and arranger at Disney theme parks and Hollywood studios, with a five-year interlude as musical director for Johnny Mathis. He wins three...