Medina Hospital better off for Cleveland Clinic affiliation

Northeast Ohio’s fastest-growing county is getting more services from the region’s biggest healthcare system.

In the year since Medina Hospital opted to join with the Cleveland Clinic, Northeast Ohio’s healthcare giant has been providing doctors and other resources in Medina County.

Cleveland Clinic doctors, for example, now staff Medina Hospital’s inpatient and intensive-care units around the clock. Patients brought to Medina Hospital with a possible stroke are examined via video conference by Cleveland Clinic specialists, who help determine if they need more aggressive care. Cleveland Clinic maternal-fetal medicine specialists are on site in Medina, enabling women with high-risk pregnancies to stay at the community hospital.

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And starting next month, a Cleveland Clinic helicopter and transport crew will be based at Medina Hospital, ready to whisk critically ill and injured patients from the region to the main campus in Cleveland within minutes.

”We have more services now than we had before,” said Medina President Robert P. Stall, a veteran of the Cleveland Clinic health system. Along with running Medina General, Stall recently was appointed assistant to the president for the Cleveland Clinic Regional Hospitals. In that role, he’s charged with helping integrate nine community hospitals into an efficient, high-quality system. Stall said the majority of his time remains devoted to running Medina Hospital, which has more than 900 employees.

Medina Hospital is coordinating services with Cleveland Clinic outpatient locations in Wooster, Brunswick and Strongsville, Stall said. Future plans could include opening a full-service, satellite emergency department in Brunswick — a move that would serve the county’s northern tier while freeing up capacity in Medina Hospital’s main ER, he said.

It remains to be seen whether the Cleveland Clinic ultimately will bring its services deeper into the Akron market. ”What we’re looking at is to continue to provide great service and continue looking at where our patients are coming from,” Stall said. ”Is Akron a possibility? It is a possibility, but so are five other places.”

Medina Hospital had been seeking a partnership with a bigger health system in Akron or Cleveland as it posted operating losses while facing growing regional competition and industry pressures. Medina Hospital opted to join the Cleveland Clinic, effective September 2009, after a deal with University Hospitals of Cleveland fell through.

”I think in this day and age, everyone realizes it’s more and more difficult for hospitals to remain stand-alone operations, said Dr. Thomas Tulisiak, Medina Hospital’s vice president of medical operations and a member of the staff since 1983. By adding more services in partnership with the Cleveland Clinic, he said, ”patients can stay closer to home. This is their home hospital.”

In recent years, big-city hospitals throughout the country have been following patients into the suburbs. Cuyahoga and Summit counties continue to lose population, along with most of Ohio’s other urban counties, according to U.S. Census Bureau annual estimates. Medina County, however, is the state’s fifth fastest-growing, with a population gain of 2,174 people in 2009.

Earlier this year, University Hospitals opened an outpatient facility less than a mile away from Medina Hospital. Last year, Akron General Health System teamed with Akron Children’s Hospital to open a 24-hour emergency department attached to the Health & Wellness Center-West off state Route 18 in Bath Township. And this fall, Akron-based Summa Health System is opening an outpatient medical center nearby in Montville and Medina townships.

”If there’s competition, so be it,” Stall said. ”It will make us better.”

The hospital continues to lose money, Stall said, but its finances have been improving since the affiliation. The deal with the Cleveland Clinic gave Medina Hospital negotiating power with insurers, better prices for purchasing supplies and the name recognition with patients that comes from being part of a large, regional health system. It also provided access to capital for renovations and other improvements.

Medina Hospital, for instance, will be connected in November to the Cleveland Clinic’s electronic medical records system. The project costs $7 million. ”Because this was a stand-alone hospital, the IT systems were not as robust as we needed to put in the electronic medical records,” Stall said. ”This is not necessarily cheap. But the quality of care we can provide our patients is incredible.”

The hospital also is completing a $1.1 million upgrade to two of its operating rooms this year and renovating its emergency department in the near future.

The Cleveland Clinic continues to work with local leaders in Medina to determine what services to enhance at the community hospital, Stall said. The hospital is run by a board of directors, which has representatives from the Medina community and medical staff as well as the Cleveland Clinic.

Likely areas of future focus include orthopedics, emergency medicine and women’s health, Stall said. ”I think we will evolve to what our patients want us to be,” he said.

The 118-bed hospital used to care for about 50 to 60 hospitalized patients per day, Stall said. In recent months, the average daily census has been 80 to 90.

”We aren’t going to do open heart surgery here,” he said. ”We aren’t going to do liver transplants here. The place downtown can do that. But we can do a lot of great things here.”