Doctors Medical Center San Pablo/Pinole CEO Announces Improved Finances, Plans for Expansion
Doctors Medical Center San Pablo/Pinole has "stanched the flow" of recent financial losses in the three months after the West Contra Costa Healthcare District assumed control of operations from Santa Barbara-based Tenet Healthcare and likely will expand, hospital CEO Irwin Hansen said this week, the Contra Costa Times reports (Lochner, Contra Costa Times, 11/20).
The health care district on Aug. 1 assumed control of operations at Doctors, which lost a total of about $10.5 million between January and August 2004. In June, voters in West Contra Costa County approved a property tax measure that will raise an estimated $6.1 million annually for the health care district. Health care district officials said that Doctors would have closed without passage of the measure. Doctors, which has 200 beds, serves patients in El Cerrito, Hercules, Pinole, Richmond and San Pablo and operates the only full-service emergency department in West Contra Costa County (California Healthline, 8/26).
In a "state of the hospital" address this week to the West County Business and Professional Association, Hansen said that Doctors has ended financial losses, which had totaled about $2 million monthly, as a result of measures to control costs, management and organizational improvements and an agreement under which Kaiser Permanente sends cancer patients to the Doctors oncology center. Hansen also said that Doctors has recruited several physicians to the oncology program and purchased new equipment. He said, "We have now a cancer program literally with world-class people."
In the future, Hansen said that he plans to expand the obstetrics program on the Doctors San Pablo campus. He also said that he hopes to improve inpatient programs, skilled care, psychiatric services and behavioral medicine at the Doctors Pinole campus, which remains under lease to Tenet until 2021. In addition, Hansen said that he hopes to build a replacement for Doctors, likely with a trauma center, by 2015 (Contra Costa Times, 11/20).