A serendipitous intersection of clinical sleuthing and business acumen may have saved a Midwestern hospital from collapse, sources reported today.
BorgONE, a regional Midwestern facility, should have been thriving – but it wasn’t. At meeting after meeting, the CMO and CEO constantly bemoaned the wafer-thin profit margins, blaming and shaming the beleaguered medical staff for failing to perform at the level corporate projections demanded. As revenues shrank, medical staff morale plummeted precipitously.
“It was more than just a general malaise,” said Medical Staff President Kevin Timmay, MD. “No matter how hard we worked, no matter how many patients we saw, or how many RVUs we generated, the message was always the same: it wasn’t enough. We were feeding the coffers constantly, but the hospital acted like it was starving.”
After one particularly brutal Medical Directors meeting, where clinical leaders were verbally berated by the non-practicing physician CMO for yet another lackluster fiscal quarter, Dr. Timmay shared his analogy with a colleague. Fortuitously, as it turned out, that colleague was Vance “Van” Helsing, MD, the Chair of the Infectious Disease Department, and his area of expertise was Clinical Parasitology.
“I have to say, it hit me like a stake through the heart,” Van Helsing recalled of the conversation. “Dr. Timmay had nailed the diagnosis without even realizing it!”
Working together, often surreptitiously, Drs. Van Helsing and Timmay performed what amounted to a full diagnostic work-up of the hospital’s leadership structure and finances. What they found shocked both of them.
“We were literally riddled with administrators,” exclaimed Timmay. “I mean, my gosh, they were everywhere.”
“Infested is actually the more accurate term,” Van Helsing chimed in. “Parasitically infested. I initially thought of Pinworms because of their anatomical site preference, but this was so much worse. These weren’t a few barely macroscopic hitchhikers. These were tapeworms of enormous size and number, who were slowly and silently siphoning off not only the institution’s main nutrient, which is cash, but also its very lifeblood, which is physician and staff morale.”
Van Helsing believes the infestation began in the Corporate Offices and then spread quickly from there. “The C-Suite is locked and bolted most of the time, which allowed the infection to fester, unseen and unchecked, for years. It will take us a while to fully recover but I think we’ve finally turned the proverbial corner now that we’ve identified and rid ourselves of the culprits.”
To date, the entirety of the hospital’s Senior Leadership Team, along with a tangled ball of vice-presidents and middle managers have been purged or, to borrow Dr. Timmay’s more clinical phrase, “excreted with prejudice.” Physician morale and hospital finances have already improved markedly.
“Administrators and physicians have to coexist in a symbiotic relationship,” said Van Helsing. “But these insidious worms were, quite literally, sucking the life out of us.”
[Note: Assimilation HealthCare, BorgONE’s corporate parent company, declined to comment for this article, citing ongoing internal review. One executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, did state that “Refutation is futile.”]
Dan Waters DO MA is a retired Cardiothoracic Surgeon and accomplished author who has published extensively in medicine, fiction, and satire. His books can be found at Bandageman Press. https://bandagemanpress.com/
