PORT ANGELES — Olympic Medical Center will open two clinics offering primary medical care when the Eighth Street Virginia Mason clinic closes on April 30.
Negotiations among Olympic Medical Center, the clinic’s doctors and their corporate parent broke down Wednesday night, said OMC Commissioner Arlene Engel.
That left Olympic Medical Center to pursue buying the Klahhane Women’s Clinic, 923 Georgiana St., from Virginia Mason-Seattle.
Olympic Medical Center also will upgrade a building it owns at 912 Caroline St.
Both clinics would house family physicians.
“We will not leave you without primary care as of May 1,” Engel told about a dozen Virginia Mason clinic patients Wednesday.
$350,000 upgrade planned
The plan calls for Olympic Medical Center to spend $350,000 upgrading the Klahhane building to “hospital standards” so its providers can bill Medicare Part A, which pays 70 percent more than doctors receive from Medicare Part B.
The Klahhane and Caroline Street clinics together would house up to seven of the Virginia Mason clinic’s nine family practitioners and its three nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants.
The clinics would employ 65 of the 77 Virginia Mason staff members.
“We will have enough staff to handle things,” Engel said.
In addition, cardiologists and pain-management specialists would occupy the Klahhane clinic, while internists would work at Caroline Street.
Under the Olympic Medical Center plan, the current Virginia Mason clinic building at 433 E. Eighth St. would be abandoned.
All the medical professionals would work as independent contractors for Olympic Medical Center, which would set their hours and patient loads.
The doctors currently are employees of Virginia Mason, which says it has lost $10 million since buying the formerly independent clinic in 1995.
Doctors who join the Olympic Medical Center clinics would pay their own malpractice insurance premiums.
How many of Virginia Mason clinic’s providers will accept the offer remains unknown.
Olympic Medical Center commissioners have ruled out hiring them outright as physicians.