Mercy Request Hits Snag: Competitors Oppose Doing Heart Surgery at Baptist West
By Carly Harrington, The Knoxville News Sentinel, Tenn.
Jul. 23–Mercy Health Partners, parent company of the merged Baptist and St. Mary’s health systems, will ask the state today to allow the initiation of open heart surgery services at Baptist Hospital West.
The certificate-of-need request, which will be heard by the Tennessee Health Services and Development Agency in Nashville, has drawn opposition from competitors Covenant Health and the University of Tennessee Medical Center.
Also filing letters of opposition with the state are Parkwest Medical Center in West Knoxville and Methodist Medical Center in Oak Ridge, which are owned and operated by Covenant, as well as three individual physicians who practice at either a Covenant hospital or UT Medical Center.
Mercy wants to move open heart services previously provided at the former Baptist Hospital of East Tennessee in downtown Knoxville to Baptist Hospital West in the Turkey Creek retail development. The $1.2 million project will not increase the number of licensed beds and no other health services are being proposed.
A request to move 36 beds from Baptist Hospital of East Tennessee to St. Mary’s Medical Center North on Emory Road is unopposed.
Officials at Covenant and UT Medical Center declined Tuesday to comment beyond letters submitted to the state, though representatives from those organizations as well as from Parkwest and Methodist Medical are expected to attend the meeting to voice their opposition.
“The proposed project is not needed in the service area and approval of the proposed venture will not reflect or promote the orderly development of health care services in the area,” wrote Mike Richardson, vice president of planning and business development for Covenant.
Norman Majors, senior vice president and chief administrative officer for UT Medical Center, said approval of such a program “at this small suburban hospital, even in light of the announced consolidation of a portion of the Baptist Hospital of East Tennessee program into the St. Mary’s Medical Center program, is not in the best interest of the community and does not meet the criteria for the issuance of a certificate of need.”
Cardiac surgery programs are available at Parkwest, UT Medical Center, St. Mary’s, Fort Sanders Regional and Methodist Medical.
Brent Grishkin, a cardiothoracic surgeon who has practiced at Parkwest Medical Center since 1996, called six heart surgery programs (including the one previously at Baptist downtown), “an excessive number and that consolidation into three or four programs would be preferable.”
The merger of Baptist and St. Mary’s health systems and subsequent closure of Baptist’s cardiac surgery program would, he said, provide “a step toward consolidation” while maintaining options for patients. Those who would have otherwise gone to Baptist can be served by Mercy at St. Mary’s, Fort Sanders Regional and UT Medical Center, he added.
“Approving the request to establish a new program can potentially have an adverse effect on the current level of quality of care present in Knoxville, both by having a low volume program which may be associated with suboptimal outcomes, and by limiting the potential expansion of the current programs into higher annual operative volumes,” Grishkin wrote.
Joseph Metcalf, a general and vascular surgeon and chief of staff at Methodist Medical, said a cardiac program at Baptist West would duplicate services provided by the Oak Ridge hospital for the past 18 years.
“There is no way that an open heart program at Baptist West can be successful without adversely impacting the volume of open heart procedures performed at Methodist. Baptist West will draw open heart patients from the same service area as ours,” Metcalf wrote.
Thomas Gaines, associate professor of surgery and chief cardiothoracic surgery service at UT graduate school of medicine and UT Medical Center, said that he did not approve of the CON though his name had unknowingly been given as supporting the request.
“The market forces, which resulted in the closure of East Tennessee Baptist Hospital and its cardiac surgical program, are still very much active and to attempt to undo such a market-based correction would be to squander additional healthcare resources,” Gaines wrote.
The Tennessee Health Services and Development Agency will meet at 8:30 a.m. in Room 12 of the Legislative Plaza at the corner of Sixth Avenue North and Union Street in Nashville.
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