Cooperation, not consolidation, is the force moving Lexington’s Shriners Hospitals for Children from its well-known location on Richmond Road to a new state-of-the-art medical center on the University of Kentucky campus.
Instead of continuing to operate as a hospital in its new location, the Shriners Hospitals for Children Medical Center will be an outpatient facility, providing surgery, care and rehabilitation. Complex surgical procedures that require inpatient care will be performed at Kentucky Children’s Hospital, across the street on South Limestone.
“We have been and still will be two distinct, separate entities,” said Tony Lewgood, Lexington Shriners hospital administrator, about the relationship with Kentucky Children’s Hospital, part of UK HealthCare. “We will own and operate our new medical center with a commitment to continue the culture and family-centered care thousands of families and children have experienced since the very first Shriners hospital opened in Lexington back in 1926. Relocating to the UK HealthCare campus strengthens our mission to not only provide expert orthopedic care to children but also be leaders in education and research.”
Construction on the fi ve-story $47 million ambulatory facility, which will lease the top two floors to UK for its ophthalmology department, begins in February and is expected to be completed by May 2017. An $8 million capital campaign kicked off in October has already raised $6.5 million toward the project, said Lewgood. “It’s going really well,” he said. “We have gotten a lot of support from both the Shriners and the community.”
The hospital’s current location, which is owned by Shriners Hospitals for Children, will eventually be sold. Lewgood said Masonic Homes of Kentucky has expressed interest in the sprawling property as a potential assisted living facility.
The new Shriners Hospitals for Children Medical Center will occupy 60,000 square feet of space on the bottom three fl oors of the building with its fast-growing outpatient services. Outpatient procedures account for 85 percent of its current caseload, which has more than doubled since the Richmond Road hospital was built in 1988, with more than 11,000 patients being seen last year.
Shriners hospital, a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit, has long contracted with UK HealthCare to provide pediatric orthopedists to treat its patients, a majority of whom are being seen for scoliosis, cerebral palsy, club foot, and hip and joint conditions.
“This arrangement with UK predates me coming here,” said Lewgood, who has been the administrator at Lexington’s Shriners hospital for 21 years. “We’ve always had a cooperative – not competitive – relationship.”
Lewgood said Dr. Michael Karpf, executive vice president of UK HealthCare, approached him six years ago asking to meet with the Shriners hospital governance board to discuss how they could better serve the community’s children.
With inpatient numbers at Shriners hospital declining due to medical advancements that no longer require children to stay overnight following surgery, Karpf said he was worried that Shriners might decide to close the hospital here in Lexington and consolidate its services with those of another Shriners hospital in a bigger city.
“I didn’t want Lexington to lose Shriners; their pediatric specialists are on our faculty, and it’s an outstanding group of orthopedists,” Karpf said. “If they moved, we wouldn’t have been able to maintain the volume and the level of program we have.”
While working at UCLA Medical Center, Karpf had seen Shriners Hospital Los Angeles and the medical center form a mutually benefi cial relationship that had turned out well, so he decided to propose something similar here in Lexington. “They do God’s work and are such good, altruistic people, but they had to adapt to the new reality of health care,” said Karpf. “The stock market had also crashed around that time, hurting endowments and increasing the need to be fi nancially prudent.”
Lewgood and the Shriners’ board saw the value of the proposal and formed a committee in 2010 that began assessing the future and refining a plan to move to the UK campus. That plan was approved last year by the Shriners governance board.
“We are moving from a larger inpatient hospital to a smaller, more cost-effective outpatient facility while improving our care for children and increasing our outpatient capacity,” Lewgood said. “We no longer need 117,000 square feet of space and 50 beds.”
The remaining 15 percent of surgical patients who require overnight stays will be cared for at Kentucky Children’s Hospital, which is able to off er more access to subspecialty resources, such as a pediatric intensive care unit, Lewgood said.
“All the current literature suggests that’s where the standard of care is headed,” he said. “It would have been very costly to add a pediatric intensive care unit, and a duplication of services. Now, those few inpatients surgeries will be done at Kentucky Children’s Hospital, a facility that meets that standard of care.”
Being located on the UK campus will aid Shriners hospital not only in its mission to care for children with orthopedic conditions, said Lewgood, but also fulfi ll its educational and research goals. Students will be able to get practical experience at Shriners medical center, whether as residents, interns or working in its administrative offi ces, while Shriners medical center will also be able to participate in UK’s clinically applied research.
“This is a clinical improvement in the care of children and a better alignment of resources,” said Lewgood.