PORT ANGELES — Olympic Medical Center commissioners will adopt an “action plan” Oct. 16 to protect primary health care in Clallam County.
Meeting barely a year after Virginia Mason Medical Center announced it would close its clinics in Port Angeles, commissioners said Wednesday they want to prevent such a predicament from occurring again.
They and an audience of about 100 people listened Wednesday as a consultant recounted how a task force of 22 doctors, patients and OMC officials has sorted through more than a dozen options for supporting family practices.
The two systems they probably will offer are a new Rural Health Clinic and an OMC provider-based facility.
The need to support primary care physicians was dramatized by events that could be called the Virginia Mason crisis.
In late September 2005, the Seattle-based health care provider announced it would close its satellite clinics in Port Angeles — firing 11 family doctors, orphaning about 11,000 primary care patients and leaving nearly 8,000 of them without a doctor who would accept Medicare.
Since then, the medical center has leased the former Virginia Mason clinic on Eighth Street and contracted with nine of its primary care physicians.
The lease and the contracts will expire Dec. 31.
By then, OMC wants alternative systems in place to support family doctors.
Alternatives for doctors
Any doctor in an independent private practice could continue going solo, said Kevin Kennedy of Executive Consulting Group of Seattle, which advised the task force.
However, his financial analysis of such a practice — if it bore its share of Medicare patients — showed it would lose about $20,000 a year.
That’s because Medicare Part B reimburses only about a fourth of a physician’s charges.
As for the first alternative, a doctor who wants to be independent from the hospital but who is willing to join a group practice could enlist in a Rural Health Clinic office and do half again as well as a lone private practitioner.
It would take about nine months for the state Department of Health to certify such a clinic.
Family Medicine of Port Angeles already operates under such a designation.
The second — and most profitable — option would be a provider-based clinic owned and largely operated by the hospital.
Doctors could be hospital employees or individual contractors.
