news@dailylobo.com
@StephCHoover
The state of the new Sandoval Regional Medical Center dominated discussions at the UNM Hospital Board of Directors’ meeting Friday.
The prognosis: healthy and flourishing.
SRMC, which is owned by UNM, opened in July 2012 and is located in northern Rio Rancho. It is generating revenue and accepting transfers from UNMH, according to Steve McKernan, the Chief Executive Officer of the Health Sciences System.
During the previous week, McKernan said, there were days in which as few as 20 patients were served. But by that Friday, they were already up to 53 patients by midafternoon. He said SRMC’s goal is to serve around 55 patients a day.
“In community hospitals you see much greater swings in patient volume,” McKernan said. “We’re working very hard to move services out of UNMH over to SRMC so that we can level out some of those swings.”
As for the patients in the operating room, SRMC is looking to increase its patient load by 3 patients per day during the business week, amounting to around 360 patients a month. McKernan said the facility saw 278 patients in October.
He added that the center’s pulmonary, oncology and infectious disease units are well staffed. However, they have had problems with high turnover rates of nurses and some technical professional specialists, said Paul Roth, chancellor for Health Sciences.
Gastroenterology, which involves the digestive system, is one area where the medical center is lacking in coverage. However, recent contracts with private physicians will change this, he said.
SRMC and a group of private GI physicians signed contracts last week, allowing for gastroenterology to be covered completely at SRMC, which prevents doctors from being pulled away from UNMH. Roth said the services will likely start being offered within the month.
“We’ll be able to provide all of the GI services shortly,” he said. “I don’t know what the timeline will be as for when we’ll actually get boots on the ground there, but that’s a huge advance for SRMC.”
The changes being implemented at SRMC, coupled with a medical center that is able to take on some of the non-urgent scheduled surgeries from UNMH, will allow the state to bring in more revenue, Roth said. He said this is possible because having a referral center such as SRMC means UNMH can take more patients. which was previously impossible due to lack of facilities. This will generate more revenue because the hospital will not have to turn patients away, he said.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
“By taking some of those scheduled types of cases from UNM Hospital, it would permit UNM Hospital to receive transfers from other hospitals that, up to this point, it had to reject because it had no capacity to accept them,” Roth said. “So the strategies that we’ve begun are already bearing fruit, and we have not yet seen the impact of those kinds of changes. So, I think we’re all very optimistic.”
