Local Leadership Philosophies
HMA’s acquisition of a hospital offers its community a win-win scenario. We understand that the delivery of health care services is a locally driven process. As such, new acquisitions retain their heritage and local feel, with the opportunity to transition into a thriving regional medical center.
A typical barrier impacting an acquisition is the concern by a prospective hospital’s management of losing local control. We are sensitive to these concerns, and we employ an operating style that allays these fears. We insist that our acquired hospitals establish a local board of trustees to include community leaders and members of the medical staff. We also insist that the acquired hospital’s local leadership – its chief executive officer, chief financial officer and chief nursing officer – live in the community and lead the hospital’s day-to-day operations.
We believe that rigid, centralized management impairs the decision-making process and undermines the competitive strengths of local leadership. Our focus at the corporate level is to provide additional supportive management expertise and resources, including sophisticated information technology platforms to support our hospitals.
Each hospital operates HMA’s timetested proprietary Pulse System® upon acquisition. This system is a uniform information platform that includes consistent, comprehensive programs for accounting, medical records, business office operations and certain clinical programs.
HMA Signature Programs
We also introduce three other HMA signature programs shortly following acquisition: Nurse First, ProMed, and MedKey™.
Nurse First
Nurse First is a program designed to shorten the waiting time for ER patients and to determine which patients require more immediate attention.
Nurse First is even more important in smaller communities. It is commonplace for patients to arrive at the ER without having a regular physician. Since more than half our patients enter our hospitals through the ER doors, we know that a positive initial impression often determines whether an individual will return to our hospitals when other medical needs arise.
ProMed
ProMed is a computer-accessed diagnostic tool that helps doctors assess a patient’s condition, formulate a diagnosis and suggest a course of treatment. When combined with the Nurse First program, our ER services reach patients two to three times faster than the national average of five to six hours.
MedKey™
MedKey™ is a bar-coded identification card that our hospitals provide to local residents, free of charge. It contains basic patient information that streamlines the admission and registration process and, in some instances, can help speed medical treatment.
At year end, more than a million MedKey™ cards were in use in communities where we operate hospitals.