Sy Johnson, CEO of Samaritan Valley Hospitals in Albany, Corvallis and Lebanon, gave an overview of how Samaritan’s affiliation with MultiCare Health System will provide more services to the valley during a lunch forum hosted by the Lebanon Chamber of Commerce on April 24.
“I think this scale that we’re connecting to and the expertise we’re connecting to gives me confidence that over the coming decades we’ll be positioned to make sure that what you get is what you should get,” he said.
Samaritan Health Services applied to the Washington-based organization last November, and is currently in a period of review by the state, during which time the public can weigh-in to the state with questions and comments.
As such, Samaritan is in a state of limbo as it waits to learn whether it will be accepted into the locally governed nonprofit that can provide Samaritan’s patients access to better services and expertise, Johnson said.
With healthcare in increasing demand across the country – more hospital admissions, more doctors visits, more drugs prescribed, more imaging scans – patients are in need of a lot of services that they want access to, he said.
“They want it quickly and they want it without a lot of cost,” he said. “Samaritan is part of the country’s infrastructure trying to make sure we’re doing all we can to deliver that – how do we make sure that you have access to everything you need as quickly and easily and cheaply as possible? And so that’s a big lift.”
As Samaritan looks at itself, looks at how things in the country are changing, considers the scope and scale and all the implications, “that whole conversation has led to this discussion about the affiliation with MultiCare.”
It comes down to access to expertise, Johnson said.
In order to be confident Samaritan is providing access to all the best possible services needed, then expertise is needed in multiple areas, he said. That includes staying on top of what’s at the forefront of medical care and oncology, how to fund it, what’s going on in AI, how technology is changing, and what’s going on in Washington, DC, and Salem that’s impacting all that.
“All these many complex factors, you need a lot of people who have a lot of deep expertise to manage all that and incorporate all that and make sure that at the end of the day, when you’re delivering care to bedside or in a doctor’s office or virtually in some other way, that’s the best possible care that it can be with the resources that exist across all of that spectrum,” he said.
And that’s something that is hard to do on Samaritan’s scale, but connecting to an organization such as MultiCare can maximize the potential. Johnson said MultiCare has a “deeper pool of talent and the funding to support that to be in all those places and to know all those things all in real time, all year long, year after year.”
As Samaritan waits for an answer from the state, executives are confident it will be approved, he said. If, or when, it is approved, the next step is the transaction between the two healthcare systems, “and then we’re live.”
The first thing Johnson wanted listeners to understand is that Samaritan expects to provide continuity – nothing will be disrupted.
“That means we continue to run all the hospitals that we run. That means we continue to run all the programs that we run, cardiovascular care, trauma services, oncology services, critical access, hospitals, primary care, outpatient surgery, all the things you know about, they’ll continue. You won’t see a change in any of those things after close.”
The second thing to expect is increased opportunity.
“There are opportunities to increase the value of the care that we deliver, to do a better job of it, to do it at a lower cost,” he said.
And also aligning around access and market needs, as it is understood that Samaritan patients may have trouble accessing primary care services, Johnson said.
“In general, we know we have opportunity to increase access, and we need to increase access, and we see ways that we can do that, leveraging some of the capabilities and some of the ways that we know MultiCare has done that in other communities that we have not done in Samaritan before,” he said. “Now we think we can bring some of that here, and that will help all of us get access to things that we need more easily, and maybe it’ll be a better price point.”
And finally, Samaritan expects to provide improved care models through its merger with MultiCare, which would involve having leaders at the forefront of the range of diseases who can provide expertise in the changing landscape of healthcare.
“What that means for us is that we’ll have access to more expertise when we include all of MultiCare’s experts than we have when we only include our own, and that will only make us stronger. It won’t dramatically change any of our services, because we’re already doing that, but I think as we move forward, we’ll be able to stay stay current and stay as close to the forefront as possible all the time.”
The merger will make Samaritan the first Oregon-based health system for MultiCare. And Johnson believes Samaritan benefits MultiCare with its knowledge and experience with medical education, “figuring out how we can expand programs and help train more physicians and providers across the region.”
By sharing expertise and access between the two healthcare systems, Johnson said patients should be able to expect better care, which is what Samaritan is all about.
“Samaritan cares about health and healthcare for everybody across the whole continuum,” he said. “We take all of it seriously and want to do the best we can possibly do for everybody across the valley and all the way to the coast.”