Greenwood and Leflore County officials — at least some of them — have wanted to get out of the hospital business.
They tried in 2022 and again in 2023 to lease Greenwood Leflore Hospital, only to have one interested party back away at the 11th hour and two others to submit proposals that were not worth considering.
They could get another chance, though, if legislation to create the Delta Regional Health Authority is enacted.
The proposed authority is being recommended by Delta Council, which worked with outside health-care experts to come up with the plan that’s embodied in the legislation now under consideration at the Capitol.
Their conclusion is that hospitals operating in this heavily rural, impoverished and shrinking region cannot make it any longer by operating independently. They are going to have to join forces as a way to cut costs and maintain and expand medical services, but someone has got to be in charge of such a collaboration.
The health authority would be that someone.
As proposed, the authority would take over operational control of the participating hospitals. It would hire a CEO to handle the day-to-day management, including the power to hire and fire, and the authority would decide what medical services go where.
The arrangement would be more efficient, allowing the hospitals in the collaboration to pool resources, such as purchasing an electronic medical records system that each facility can use. It would also create a network of care, all within the Delta, in which different specialties would be concentrated at different hospitals. One hospital might be designated as a “Center of Excellence” for cardiology, for example, another for urology and maybe a third for neonatal intensive care. Instead of a handful of hospitals fighting it out to see which one can land a low-in-supply urologist, they would aggregate all the urologists at the same location, where they could collaborate and provide backup for each other. The urologists would like that, which would help with recruiting, and while it may inconvenience some patients, it would be a loss less inconvenient than having no nearby options for the care.
This regionalization of care in rural areas is becoming the trend, say those who put the Delta authority proposal together. The novelty, though, for this region is that it doesn’t fit the “hub and spoke” model that has been used elsewhere because there’s no one community in the Delta that would be the logical hub. That’s why they are proposing the Centers of Excellence, where physicians would be concentrated by specialty, but not all specialties would be in the same place.
Ironically, though, this proposal for a Delta Regional Health Authority appears to have more support outside of the Delta than within it, at least among those who serve in the Mississippi Legislature. When the concept was first rolled out a couple of weeks ago at the Capitol, the feedback from several lawmakers in the Delta’s delegation was heavily negative. They felt excluded from the formulation of the plan, and they think it’s being dictated by white Republicans who believe they know better than Black Democrats how to operate the institutions that serve majority Black populations.
Even if the proposal could get through the GOP-dominated Legislature without Democratic support, there is going to have to be some significant selling done to get the community hospitals on board. The hospital administrators may see the merit of collaboration, but they don’t have the final say. That belongs with the county boards of supervisors and, in Greenwood’s case, its City Council.
All of these are represented by elected officials, for whom giving up control does not come easy or naturally. Consider how the Leflore County Board of Supervisors and the Greenwood City Council have fought over their joint appointment on the Greenwood Leflore Hospital Board. As the legislation for the Delta Regional Health Authority is written, not only would local hospital boards have diminished powers, but their membership would eventually be determined by the authority itself. The larger hospitals participating in the authority would most likely get a seat each on its board, but that might amount to one vote out of 11.
Wade Litton, a Delta Council leader from Greenwood who was involved in the formulation of the authority plan, thinks selling the hospitals and their owners on the concept should not be hard if everyone is focused on the right things: how to create a great and sustainable health-care system in this region and what’s best for the patients.
In the case of Greenwood and Leflore County, they might also think about this number: $11 million. That’s what they have had to pump in over the past year to keep the hospital’s doors open. Local control is not so great when it means having to strain budgets and raise taxes to maintain it.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
