PORT ANGELES — Primary medical care in Clallam County resembles a patient who’s been hospitalized after a heart attack.
Its life has been saved, but it’s not out of the woods.
The hospital comprises the literal part of the metaphor. It’s Olympic Medical Center.
The heart attack was Virginia Mason Medical Center’s closing its satellite clinics in Port Angeles on April 30, giving a bad scare to its family physicians and their nearly 13,000 patients, many of them on Medicare.
OMC stepped in to lease Virginia Mason’s Eighth Street Clinic, sign contracts with nine of its primary care providers, buy the Klahhane Clinic on Georgiana Street, and run the operation — admitting there are some snarls and snafus — with a reduced volume of patients.
Threats to the enterprise remain, however:
* The Eighth Street building is for sale, and OMC doesn’t expect to lease it longer than Dec. 31.
* That’s the same day the doctors’ contracts expire.
* Remodeling a clinic on Caroline Street that will house some of the ex-Virginia Mason doctors — others may move to OMC’s facilities in Sequim — still is in the planning stage.
* The Eighth Street undertaking — renamed Olympic Medical Physicians Primary Care Clinic — has lost $163,000 since June 1, although its losses are dropping.
No one’s sure if the building will be sold, where the doctors will go or when the business will break into the black.
And the clinic’s Medicare patients aren’t the only ones who are aging. Many of the family doctors throughout the county are nearing retirement.
Task force assembled
OMC Administrator Mike Glenn is hosting a task force — Making Primary Care Viable in Clallam County — that has assembled 17 doctors, three citizens and two hospital commissioners.
The group is examining a half-dozen models for running publicly supported primary care, including the “Twin Falls Plan” that bills Medicare for hospital facilities as well as physician’s services.
“We are truly understanding the nuts and bolts of these different physicians’ clinic structures,” Glenn told OMC commissioners at a meeting Wednesday night.
Doctors on the task force include both former Virginia Mason physicians now under contract to OMC and providers in private practice.
The latter contingent played a key role in the Virginia Mason crisis by opposing the hospital’s hiring the Virginia Mason doctors outright.
Indeed, OMC has attracted criticism for subsidizing profitable specialties and competing with private doctors.
The primary care question does not seem to fit that mode, however, primarily because family practices aren’t so lucrative as specialties and must bear the Medicare burden of stingy reimbursements.
