Saturday, October 16, 2004

Healthy outlook

University Medical Center and University Physicians are playing leading roles in local health care development

ANNE T. DENOGEAN

Tucson Citizen

The story of the expanding empire of University Medical Center and University Physicians Inc., the doctors who practice there, is one of desire meeting opportunity. Simply put, the desire to expand met up with the opportunities to do so.

Over the past two years, UPI has taken over management of the former Kino Community Hospital at 2800 E. Ajo Way, now called University Physicians Hospital at Kino, and expanded its services on the East Side with the opening of a 20,000-square-foot clinic at 535 N. Wilmot Road.

UMC, in the meantime, is demolishing the old Tucson General Hospital at North Campbell Avenue and East Allen Road and putting up a $20 million cancer center in its place. It will be a one-stop center where patients can see doctors, receive related services and hold support groups. There will be office and research space, as well as housing for out-of-town patients. The first phase is expected to be done by 2006.

The existing Arizona Cancer Center on the UMC campus, 1501 N. Campbell Ave., will house mostly research.

The Tucson General Hospital site is 17 acres. With an always-growing need for space, UMC seized the opportunity to buy the property in 2001 from Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Tenet HealthSystem. Tenet had taken back the property from a local owner who could no longer make the payments.

UPI, still looking for more space for its doctors to provide patient care, do research and teach, also recognized an opportunity in late 2002 when county Administrator Chuck Huckelberry announced plans to convert Kino, a general hospital, into a primarily psychiatric facility because of the millions of dollars Kino was losing every year.

The controversial proposal would have left Tucson without a general medical hospital south of Broadway. The medically underserved South Side would have become even more so.

The county and the University of Arizona had discussed forming a partnership to run Kino in 1992 and again in 1994 with no success.

This time, the ending was different.

Avoiding what could have become a huge political soap opera for the county, UPI took over the property in mid-June with a plan to restore it as a full-service hospital within a few years.

The county is covering UPI's losses at Kino for 10 years, starting with $25 million the first year and decreasing to $8 million over the decade.

By that time, UPI believes it will have built up a substantial enough patient base to be profitable where the county was not, said Norm Botsford, chief executive officer of the physicians group and the hospital.

For many years, Kino played an important role in serving the county's poor people. However, its patient numbers had dwindled in recent years with the expansion of the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, which allowed patients to go to the hospital of their choosing. Many of those patients chose to no longer go a hospital stigmatized as a charity ward.

Botsford said building up patient numbers is the key to success at Kino because, as the county well knows, it costs almost as much for UPI to operate a hospital with a low patient census as a high one.

"Today, we have 71 patients here," he said in an interview in September. "About two-thirds of our staffing would be here if their census was 71 or 17."

The lure for bringing back old patients and attracting new ones is the quality and reputation of university doctors, he said.

"I think our lead is our physicians." Botsford said. "We're very proud of them. They're very accomplished."