Balancing today's healthcare priorities and challenges
Our LLUH board meets at the end of this month for the last time in this extended seven-year "quinquennium," following the Adventist church's delayed cycle. Several members are "terming out," having served faithfully for the past 17 years. At our Constituency meeting in April, we will be voting in a new board that will include some new members, as well as many previous members, to make up the 36-member board that we will depend upon in the years ahead. This board will initially serve for a shortened period of just three years as we get back on our regular five-year cycle.
Providing effective governance over an institution of this complexity and size, with an annual budget of $3.5 billion and nearly 18,000 employees, is no small responsibility!
It has been a year and a half, just 18 months, since we opened our new adult and pediatric hospitals, the Dennis and Carol Troesh Medical Campus. During the planning phase, we debated the number of beds we should build and were occasionally criticized for making the hospital too big. Health care was changing rapidly, we were told. Many procedures are now being done as outpatients, so the advice was that hospitals should be smaller.
Now, even as COVID has greatly decreased, our adult inpatient census at both our Loma Linda and Murrieta campuses is the highest it has ever been, at times straining our capacity and resources. Our emergency departments, though expanded at both sites, are receiving unprecedented numbers of patients. Despite all the challenges of caring for more patients than ever before, we continue to achieve nation-leading quality results as evidenced by Leapfrog Top Children's Hospital and Top Teaching Hospital recognitions.
Our Faculty Medical Group has recently opened a multispecialty clinic in Rancho Cucamonga to expand our coverage on the west side of the Inland Empire. SAC Health, our affiliated Federally Qualified Health Center, also continues to expand its clinic network, utilizing our physician faculty. The community's desire for Loma Linda care continues to outpace our capacity!
MediCal (Medicaid) and Medicare patients make up 70% of the total population in our service region. Within this demographic, we now see more MediCal patients than any other private hospital in California and a far higher proportion than any of the University of California teaching hospitals. Our Children's Hospital inpatients are the sickest children in our area, with around 80% of them supported by MediCal. For all our patients, we seek to maximize the quality of our care while maintaining our productivity through close collaboration between our hospitals and physicians.
This ever-expanding desire for Loma Linda services is the reality we face every day while pursuing our motto, "To Make Man Whole." To aid in this endeavor, the State of California, while acknowledging we are a private, faith-based institution, has just appropriated $135 million to expand our pediatric capacity. They recognize that we serve every Californian, from the neediest to the well-insured. These funds will allow us to build a new pediatric outpatient building to consolidate our specialty services, remodel a floor in our old hospital into 49 adolescent psychiatry beds, and do a number of upgrades and expansions of existing programs for children.
With the majority of hospitals in California and across the country facing huge headwinds in this environment, we acknowledge our own challenges. From constrained reimbursement rates to elevated inflation to recruiting and retaining talent, we share the arduous task facing healthcare in America today. I am deeply indebted to our leadership team, who meet daily as we seek to balance priorities, both today and for the years ahead.
Sincerely,
Richard H. Hart, MD, DrPH
President
Loma Linda University Health
