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State approves Kaleida-ECMC consolidation
By ARTHUR PAGE
Assistant Vice President
New York State Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines traveled to Buffalo Monday to announce his department’s approval of the consolidation of the Kaleida Health System and Erie County Medical Center to create the Western New York Healthcare System.
The department also announced approval of the certificate of need application for a new Global Vascular Center in Buffalo that will bring together physicians, researchers and educators to address heart and vascular diseases. UB will have a major role in the center, to be located near Buffalo General Hospital on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. The center is slated to open in early 2011.
Noting that just a week earlier it appeared that because of a deadlock between Kaleida and ECMC any reconfiguration involving the two “would proceed under draconian court orders, blunt mandates from the commissioner of health,” Daines offered copious thanks and congratulations to those responsible for the agreement that was reached just days before the June 30 deadline set for achieving agreement.
Among groups and individuals singled out for praise were UB and President John B. Simpson; David L. Dunn, vice president for health sciences; and Michael E. Cain, dean of the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Also cited were a group of 10 physicians, many of them UB faculty members, who played a major role in breaking the deadlock. The physicians, Daines added, will have a major role in the consolidation in terms of deciding medical services to be offered and at which sites.
“Under this agreement, Erie County Medical Center and Kaleida join together under the unified governance of the Western New York Healthcare System,” Daines said at a press conference in UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences.
“They join not to fight old battles or to defend parochial interests. They join because leaders from the community and from both hospitals stepped forward at a critical time and said that it was time for Buffalo to look forward, not backward, to aspire to greatness, not mediocrity, to come together, not wallow in division.”
The agreement gives members of the board of the state-appointed Western New York Healthcare System the authority to create an integrated health system that will enhance physician training and advance clinical research. The board, led by Robert D. Gioia, president of the John R. Oishei Foundation, includes representatives from UB, ECMC, Kaleida and the community.
“Under this agreement, everyone gains,” Daines said. “Joined together, Kaleida and ECMC will be able to focus on their strengths and apply their resources strategically, rather than being forced to probe for each other’s vulnerabilities and fritter away resources in defensive, shortsighted tactics.”
UB, he added, “will emerge in the catalytic role a great university and medical school can and must play in an academic medical center and in the intellectual and economic development of a region. Five or 10 years from now, ‘trained in Buffalo’ and ‘treated in Buffalo’ can have the automatic and positive connotation associated with the world-class centers of Boston, New York City, Cleveland or Pittsburgh.”
Daines said “the biggest winners” in the merger “are the residents of Western New York who will benefit from access to integrated, high-quality, local health services. Primary and preventive care will be infused with energy. Secondary level care will occur in a vastly improved, rationalized and re-capitalized hospital system.
“Increasing numbers of patients will stay in Buffalo or come to Buffalo for the highest level of tertiary and quaternary care. The triple synergy of advanced medical care, vibrant medical training and scientific research will be exploited to attract investment in biomedical research, development and facilities.”
Dunn, who spoke on behalf of UB at the press conference, said the consolidation and UB’s role in the new healthcare system will help bolster the university’s Academic Health Center and plans to build an academic medical center as a centerpiece for the UB 2020 strategic plan and economic development in Western New York. “We think we can build a magnet here; a patient magnet, a training magnet,” he added.
Dunn said the Global Vascular Center, which will focus on prevention and treatment of a disease entity that is the No. 1 killer in the region, will serve as the model for the creation of centers of health-care excellence focusing in other medical areas, perhaps in orthopedics and transplantation.
Alluding to the fact that area residents often have traveled to other cities for specialty medical services, Dunn said patients will notice the difference the new system and these centers make by the fact that “they will be going to a hospital, a center of excellence, here in Buffalo, not Pittsburgh, Cleveland or Rochester.”