Danville Regional CEO gets 18-month check up

Register & Bee Published: May 9, 2009

Jerel Humphrey, CEO of Danville Regional Medical Center, took time last week to reflect on what has been accomplished at the hospital during the almost 18 months he has been at the helm.
Humphrey, most often seen without a tie and wearing a sweater vest, laughs and jokes easily, but quickly turns serious when talking about what has transpired for the good and what still needs to be done at the hospital since its purchase by LifePoint Hospitals Inc. four years ago.
In a January 2008 interview with the Danville Register & Bee three months into his tenure, Humphrey said the hospital was still putting its executive team together. He said Tuesday that had been accomplished.
“We’ve now had a year-plus of an administration team working together,” he said. “We have rounded out our team and have Becky Logan as our chief nursing officer and Mark Anderson as our chief financial officer. Eric Barber has been added as a chief operating officer, and our chief medical officer is Tim Starling, a past president of the medical staff, as well as having served 32 years as a nephrologist with the Danville Urology Clinic. Frank Campbell has become the chairman of the board.”
Another area that has become more focused in the past year has been community outreach. Although the hospital has “sporadically” helped with community organizations in the past, Humphrey said this past year the hospital has tried to be more consistent with it.
“(Recently) we’ve done fundraising with the Free Clinic of Danville, signed a contract with PATHS and worked with Salvation Army,” he said.
Other community organizations that have been supported by Danville Regional through sponsorships and donations include Habitat for Humanity, the Free Clinic of Danville, the Boy Scouts, Special Olympics, the Langhorne House, the Danville Life Saving Crew and the YMCA, among many others.
The hospital’s 2008 Community Benefit Report reveals it has spent $21 million on charity care and bad debt; $172.1 million on government-sponsored health care (Medicare and Medicaid); $705,104 in community benefit programs ($35,820 in financial contributions, $94,585 in health professionals education and $574,699 in physician recruitment); and $896,000 in state taxes, $224,000 in local sales tax and $832,000 in property taxes.
Recalling the initial theme for his leadership as building trust with the community, Humphrey said he has made himself available and given talks to several community groups.
“The feedback has been that people appreciate open communication, our recommitment to the community and our recruitment efforts to bring in new physicians,” he said.
In the past year, 12 new physicians have been recruited, a process that can be lengthy.
“We identify people who want to come and then we have to get them properly credentialed to be on our medical staff and then sign any agreements involved,” Humphrey said, adding with a laugh, “And then they have to come.”
The number of physicians leaving the area has “trickled,” he said.
The hospital has received nothing but good comments about the re-affiliation of the Duke Heart Center with the hospital’s Heart Center of the Piedmont at Danville Regional Medical Center for the hospital’s cardiovascular services, according to Humphrey.
“The agreements with Duke are fully signed, and Dr. Richard Embrey, the cardiothoracic surgeon, has seen a doubling of his cases already,” Humphrey said. “The (open-heart surgery) volumes are very much coming back.”
In another partnership, Danville Regional is working with the LifePoint-owned Martinsville Memorial Hospital to provide cardiology care for their patients.
“The need for cardiology coverage in Martinsville is greater than the cardiologists in the area can currently provide, so we met with and requested that the Danville cardiologists assist with the coverage issue,” Humphrey said. “To their credit, they became credentialed and privileged to practice in Martinsville. Duke Heart Services is also lending its support with one of their cardiologists covering two days a week and the Danville cardiologists covering three days a week, which includes some Saturdays.”
He said that was an intermediate measure, since the Martinsville hospital is currently recruiting cardiologists.
Danville Regional has also partnered with the Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine to bring in a residency program, which Humphrey said has brought positive comments from the community.
“The hospitalist program has also been getting a lot of positive comments from physicians and the patients being taken care of,” Humphrey said.
Hospitalists care for the patients in the hospital once they are admitted by their own physician.
Four hospitalists out of the current 15 on staff are scheduled to leave, one to pursue a fellowship and others for family reasons; however, the hospital is actively recruiting for replacements.

Millions in investments
Since LifePoint purchased Danville Regional Medical Center, the corporation has invested about $45 million in the hospital for facility improvements and equipment.
“We really do hear a lot of positive comments about the continued investment into the infrastructure of the hospital,” Humphrey said.
He cited the nursing staff as another big plus for the hospital and said that the usage of contract nursing staff has been eliminated, which he calls a “major accomplishment.”
“We have about a 5 percent turnover rate now, which is outstanding, and we are very proud of that,” he said. “The majority of the class (graduating from the hospital’s School of Nursing) this year will be hired. That’s always our game plan with the nursing school program.”
The nursing staff is “basically” fully staffed at this time, although Humphrey said that there is always some ebb and flow.
The patient census, or the number of admitted patients in the hospital at any given time, also has peaks and valleys, he said, but remains solid.
“We’ve seen a little softening of the census with the economic downturn and people putting elective procedures off as long as can,” he said. “Some of the physicians also say their patient loads are up and down. It’s really uneven right now.”
In other initiatives in the past year, the hospital has just opened a wound treatment center and an inpatient rehabilitation center and purchased another bloodmobile.

Revisiting impressions
New to the area 18 months ago, Humphrey said that his initial impressions of the Danville community were that “the people in Danville are open and friendly, there is a great future with all the economic developments and nobody knows how to merge.”
On Tuesday, Humphrey revisited those observations and said that the Danville community is still open and friendly and that, although economic development has been “stymied,” he remains “cautiously optimistic.”
On that last count, however, he holds to his original opinion, as many others do, that Danvillians are still merging-impaired.