UAMS: Oversight to remain singular

Hospital, school to be under 1 body

— The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences chancellor said Thursday that the state’s only medical school would not place its entire hospital under the oversight of a separate, nonprofit organization apart from its academic and research programs.

That strategy has been employed by some other teaching hospitals, including the Medical College of Georgia, where UAMS Chancellor Dr. Dan Rahn was president before coming to Arkansas.

Rahn made his statements in response to a question from the University of Arkansas board of trustees, which was discussing a proposed cooperative agreement between UAMS and the St. Vincent Health System during a meeting at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Leaders from UAMS and St. Vincent signed a letter of intent last week to explore a possible affiliation. That letter sets out a goal of “the formation of a jointly owned and governed network” that will treat patients in both entities’ service areas.

Hospital leaders have said that the partnership could be smaller than that or that it might not happen at all if consultants can’t find a financially agreeable arrangement.

Questions about how such a system would be governed remained unanswered.

“This is just the very beginning of what is certainly going to be a very complex process,” Rahn told trustees.

Rahn and Peter Banko, president and chief executive officer of St. Vincent, have both said any agreement would not infringe upon the hospitals’ respective identities as public and Catholic institutions.

Rahn assured trustees Thursday that women’s health services offered at UAMS would not be affected or limited by any partnership.

Many Catholic hospitals do not provide certain treatments - such as elective tubal-ligation surgeries - because of the church’s views on contraception, abortion and pregnancy.

Correspondence obtained under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act shows that Banko has e-mailed Rahn diagrams detailing a jointly owned “new entity” that would lease the buildings and programs back from both hospitals.

In an interview Monday, Rahn and Banko said that proposal was “just one option” and much further along the spectrum of possibilities than either would likely consider.

Talks are scheduled to end in December, unless both parties approve extending the discussions, the letter of intent said.

UAMS will approach a panel of lawmakers in October to seek approval to pay its half of a $1 million contract with the Deloitte consulting firm to determine how the two hospitals might share employees, facilities or equipment.

Arkansas, Pages 18 on 09/07/2012

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