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Mercy Medical Center and Great River Medical Center Choose Inpatient Management, Inc. for Hospitalist Programs


WEBWIRE

Hospitalist management provider expands acute care presence in California and Iowa


ST. LOUIS (DEC, 2010) – Mercy Medical Center Merced (MMCM), an acute care hospital in Merced, Ca., and Great River Medical Center (GRMC), an acute care hospital in West Burlington, Ia., recently selected Inpatient Management, Inc. (IMI) to provide hospitalist programs. IMI, a national provider of comprehensive hospitalist services, is installing “IMI 360º,” a complete management and staffing program at MMCM, and “IMI Edge,” a hospital medicine management model, at GRMC.

MMCM and IMI 360º
“I am excited for community to have IMI on board,” said Rob Streeter, MD, Vice President Medical Affairs at Mercy Medical Center, Merced. “IMI understands the importance of the continuity of care for patients, a critical element and tenet in hospital medicine. I was impressed with IMI’s focus on communicating clearly with the patient’s primary care physician in relation to their mutual patient’s care in the hospital. In recent years our residents and their faculty have been caring for an ever-growing number of patients. Many times those patients did not have a physician in the community. IMI will augment the educational mission of Mercy by providing care for these patients.”

Mercy Medical Center is a 196-bed general acute care hospital in the San Joaquin Valley in central California, serving communities and patients within a 50-mile radius of Merced. The hospital opened in May, 2010 as a new, improved and larger replacement for two predecessor hospitals. With an adjoining Medical Office Building, the hospital occupies more than 300,000 square feet and represents the future of healthcare for Merced and surrounding communities. MMCM is a part of the Catholic Healthcare West health system, the largest private hospital system in California and one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit health care systems.

IMI and MMCM are implementing the IMI 360º hospital medicine program in phases over a 12 – 24 month timeline. In the initial phase, the IMI 360º program employs 2.5 full time physicians, including a physician director and a nurse director, who provides administrative and clinical program coordination. The IMI 360º program at MMCM is comprehensive, providing staffing, operational infrastructure and reporting. IMI anticipates high demand from local primary care physicians and expects to expand the program rapidly.

Dr. Streeter noted, “In addition to supporting the educational mission of Mercy, IMI’s physicians will be able to care for patients of other physicians in the community who elect to have their hospitalized patents cared for in this way. When discharged, patients will be referred back to their outpatient physicians for ongoing care. This helps physicians remain available to their patients at their offices and minimizes disruptions to patients and their families when their physicians are called out to emergencies.”

Patrick Devereux, Vice President Practice Operations for IMI noted, “The Mercy Medical Center provides critical service to a broad regional community of patients and primary care physicians. We are truly delighted to bring outstanding hospitalist to the MMCM team.”


GRMC and IMI Edge
Great River Health System’s flagship facility, Great River Medical Center, provides comprehensive inpatient and outpatient medical and surgical services to residents of southwest Iowa, west-central Illinois and northeast Missouri. GRMC annually treats 27,000 people in the Emergency Department and admits more than 6,000 patients. GRMC selected the IMI Edge program, where IMI provides full management of the hospitalist program while GRMC employs the hospitalist physicians and mid-level providers.

“The development of the Hospitalist Program will help Great River Medical Center meet the needs of our inpatients,” said Tony Hayes, executive vice president at Great River Medical Center. “Our specialists work closely with our hospitalists to manage the medical problems of patients who do not have a local physician. Hospitalists will provide patients’ medical management while they are in our hospital and then refer them back to primary-care providers in the local communities for continued care.” Hayes noted, “We felt that IMI was the perfect partner for us to ensure that program launches quickly and effectively.”

The IMI Edge program at GRMC calls initially for two physicians as well as a nurse director. As the program develops, plans call for four full time physicians in total, along with mid-level providers. IMI Edge is a full hospitalist medicine program that is designed to meet all of GRMC’s clinical and operational goals.

“With the Edge program Great River employs, all of the hospitalist physicians and staff operate seamlessly within the overall hospital medicine structure that we’ve designed for GRMC,” said Angie Groeteke, IMI Vice President of Nursing Operations. “It is very exciting for us to work with GRMC administrators and medical staff to deliver outstanding care and cost savings.”

“We employ a large portion of our medical staff,” Hayes said. “We already had a commitment for one hospitalist before we started discussion with IMI. We felt we could be successful with recruitment by employing all the hospitalists. IMI offered to tailor their assistance to our needs, which were start up, operations management, recruiting assistance and supplemental physician staffing when needed. They have delivered in each of those areas.”

“We are very proud of these two new programs with such outstanding hospitals,” said Kirk Mathews, Chief Executive Officer of IMI. “We’ve designed our programs around the unique management structures, performance metrics and financial goals of each individual hospital.”



About Mercy Medical Center Merced
MMCM serves the central California region, with over 52,000 annual Emergency Room visits and more than 10,000 admissions per year. In addition to emergency services, the hospital provides critical care, cardiac, obstetric, diagnostic and rehabilitative services as well as inpatient and outpatient general medical and surgical care. In collaboration with The University of California Davis Medical Center, MMCM provides a Family Practice Residency Program, and maintains a close affiliation with the Mercy Cancer Center, provided through its parent organization, Catholic Healthcare West in conjunction with UC Davis.

About Great River Medical Center and Great River Health System
Great River Medical Center is a part of Great River Health Systems, a 378-bed regional, integrated health-care system that includes acute, skilled and long-term care; retail pharmacies, retail medical equipment and supplies services; outpatient renal dialysis and a network of specialty and primary-care clinics located throughout a three-state region. The hospital, located in West Burlington, Ia., includes a Cancer Care Center, a Center for Rehabilitation, an Emergency Department, a Heart and Vascular Center, the Klein Center for long-term care and a Neuro-Orthopedic Center.

About Inpatient Management, Inc.
Inpatient Management, Inc. (IMI), based in St. Louis, Mo., is a national provider of comprehensive hospitalist programs and consulting services. Independently owned and operated since 1997, IMI serves hospital and health system clients across the country, including Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, California, Nebraska, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama and Washington. For more information about Inpatient Management, visit www.inpatient.com.

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