If you can't join them, beat them, seems to be the approach two hospitals in Tennessee are taking to plans for a new ER facility in their area. Or maybe they're just trying not to lose market share in the local area.
Over the past month, Maury Regional Medical Center in Columbia and Williamson Medical Center in Franklin seem to have tacked in two different directions: First, they tried to woo HCA's Centennial Medical Center with an idea to jointly operate a 10,000-square-foot facility Centennial is planning in Spring Hill; now, they are trying to kill Centennial's plan to add a freestanding ED, according to the Tennessean and the Daily Herald.
In August, Williamson's and Maury's CEOs wrote Centennial's CEO, arguing that a jointly operated urgent-care center would offer advantages over a free-standing emergency facility. Centennial CEO Tom Herron wrote back on Sept. 1, to say he would be willing to meet them, although he wasn't sure federal laws would allow the sort of partnership the other two had proposed, the Tennessean reports. He also added that it might be hard to meet before the Sept. 22, Health Services Development Agency meeting to consider HCA TriStar Health Systems' certificate of need application for the new facility.
This week however, Maury and Williamson launched a PR campaign to express its opposition to the ED facility Centennial was proposing. Labeling the scope of care proposed by Centennial as an emergency department is misleading, MRMC CEO Robert Otwell said in a statement, because it gives the false impression that life-saving services and physician specialists would be readily available in the case of a true emergency. He notes that patients who need a higher level of care would be transferred out of the community to Centennial Medical Center in Nashville, more than 30 miles away, or twice the distance to Maury Regional or Williamson Regional.
To learn more:
- read Maury Regional Medical Center's press release
- read the Tennessean's article
- see the Daily Herald article
- here's the article from WKSR