Hospital tiff lands in ER.

Byline: Karen McCowan / The Register-Guard

SOMETHING SIGNIFICANT has been overlooked in McKenzie-Willamette Hospital's insurance-centered antitrust lawsuit against PeaceHealth.

Buried on Page 7 of the 15-page complaint is the longtime Springfield hospital's first public opposition to PeaceHealth's proposed new RiverBend facility in north Springfield.

"PeaceHealth has announced plans to construct a new acute care hospital facility ... approximately 4.3 miles from Plaintiff's location, at a cost in excess of $300 million," reads item 12 of the suit.

"The effect of this additional facility will be to bracket Plaintiff between PeaceHealth's Sacred Heart and RiverBend facilities and to siphon off emergency room patients of Plaintiff's, a key source of revenue for Plaintiff."

The suit buttresses this concern in a separate item, citing Bellevue, Wash.-based PeaceHealth's planned expansion of its Cottage Grove facility to include an emergency room.

McKenzie-Willamette's contention that RiverBend threatens the viability of its crucial ER business seems a surprise. It responded in mild-mannered fashion back in September, when PeaceHealth announced that it was buying 75 acres to build a new regional medical center in Springfield's Gateway district.

The smaller, independent hospital's response then was close-mouthed at worst, politely optimistic at best.

Why the about-face?

For starters, things aren't now what it seemed they'd be then, McKenzie-Willamette Chief Executive Officer Roy Orr told me.

"We actually envisioned, for a brief period, a much smaller campus at RiverBend and perhaps an opportunity for the proximity of our two campuses to shift the axis of local health care so that doctors covering patients at both facilities could more simply go back and forth and both hospitals could thrive," he said.

McKenzie-Willamette was rudely awakened to the unlikelihood of such blissful coexistence long before PeaceHealth announced Jan. 1 that it was actually buying 160 acres at RiverBend.

In September, McKenzie-Willamette was still planning to proceed with its own, now-shelved capital improvement plan - including construction of a medical office building.

After PeaceHealth announced its RiverBend plans, however, "physician interest in our building really cooled," Orr said. "We realized how much power their very large campus had to draw even independent physicians to call that campus home."

But an even greater impetus for opposing PeaceHealth's expansion plan centers on a bread-and-butter issue for McKenzie-Willamette: emergency room care.

SOMETHING SIGNIFICANT was overlooked - at least by me - in an advertising insert explaining PeaceHealth's expansion plans in Tuesday's editions of The Register-Guard.

Besides detailing RiverBend plans, the insert says a renovated Sacred Heart campus will include "24-hour emergency care."

That's a departure from PeaceHealth's September stance that the Hilyard campus would offer only "urgent care."

Orr noted that the proposed Sacred Heart urgent care "evolved into emergency room care" only after city of Eugene officials contacted McKenzie-Willamette about stepping into a looming hospital gap in the heart of Eugene.

PeaceHealth spokesman Brian Terrett denied that that was the impetus.

"Absolutely not," he said.

Rather, the change was a response to Eugene Mayor Jim Torrey's plea that emergency care remain available at Sacred Heart, he said.

Whatever the motive, the change poses a crucial distinction to McKenzie-Willamette.

"Emergency room business is extremely geographic," Orr said.

If PeaceHealth has emergency rooms at RiverBend to the north, Sacred Heart to the west, and Cottage Grove to the south, McKenzie-Willamette will be the closest emergency room only for residents to the east.

"More than 50 percent of our inpatients come in through our ER," Orr said. "When someone threatens our ability to have a healthy ER volume, they're really threatening the lifeblood of our organization."

For both Orr and McKenzie-Willamette board Chairwoman Maureen Weathers, the ER concerns are secondary to the "more imminent threat" of the insurance contracting issue.

But, "assuming that gets resolved and we're back to a level playing field," McKenzie-Willamette will still oppose the RiverBend project so long as PeaceHealth plans to also operate an emergency room at Sacred Heart, said Weathers, former Springfield mayor.

For the Springfield City Council, faced with determining RiverBend's fate, such hometown opposition will be hard to overlook.