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Dr. Douglas Girod, the new executive vice chancellor of the University of Kansas Medical Center. by KHI News Service

Rural hospitals could provide critical help addressing the state’s expected doctor shortage, according to Dr. Douglas Girod, the new executive vice chancellor of the University of Kansas Medical Center.

“This is one of those areas where if you really want to link physicians with where they need to be with funding of the educational enterprise…potentially community hospitals can step into the role,” Girod told KHI News Service.

KU officials also are planning a new $75 million medical education building on the Kansas City, Kan., campus to help train more doctors and are seeking funding help from the Legislature this year.

KU officials estimate Kansas will need 213 new doctors a year by 2030 just to maintain what is now a physician-per-resident ratio that lags the national average. To meet the national average ratio, Kansas would need about 285 new doctors a year by 2030.

Girod said community hospitals could help address doctor shortages in rural areas by funding residency slots through federal Medicare payments.

According to medical center officials, The University of Kansas Hospital pays for 280 residency slots, augmenting its federal funding with money from its clinical operations and with assistance to other hospitals

KU has 511 residency slots in Kansas City and 250 at its Wichita campus.

Kansas has done a good job trying to seed rural communities with more doctors, said Brock Slabach, senior vice president of the National Rural Health Association. He said KU’s campus in Salina was a good example of that.

National medical school accrediting bodies, Slabach said, worry about the training and oversight residents might receive in remote areas so have been reluctant to sign off on training programs outside metropolitan areas.

The federal government has also been slow to implement legislation authorizing rural training tracks, he said. And community hospitals have been reluctant to take on the responsibility because of the added costs of overseeing residents.

Though it can be hard to get them there, once young physicians arrive in smaller towns, they tend to energize the local medical communities.

“It stimulates the physicians in those communities,” he said. “They are challenged a bit in terms of their assumptions and what they have learned. They have someone coming out maybe with some different perspectives on things because of their more recent education.”

KU efforts to construct its new medical building hit a snag in the Legislature last week, when the Senate Ways and Means Committee voted to cut $10 million that Gov. Sam Brownback proposed for the project.

The House Appropriations Committee today approved the $10 million.

In his proposed two-year budget, Gov. Sam Brownback included $3 million in fiscal 2014 and $7 million in fiscal 2015 for KU's effort to build a new $75 million medical education building. The governor also endorsed giving the medical center $35 million in bonding authority for the project.

KU officials say they could train about 25 new doctors a year on the Kansas City campus after the improvements, and need the new facilities anyway or else the school's accreditation could be in peril.

Kathy Damron, a lobbyist for KU, said the facility is needed, in part, to integrate instruction of doctors, nurses and other medical staff, currently trained in separate facilities.

"It will allow the doctor to learn with the nurse, with the anesthesiologist and so on — all in a simulation lab. Right now, we train them all separately and throw them in the hospital and say 'now work together.' And that doesn't really work. That's the modality that schools of medicine are now moving to," Damron said. "The accreditors want to see that we're moving in the right direction to change the modality in which we're teaching our medical students.

Should the state funding come through, Girod said he was confident that KU could raise the $22 million it has pledged toward the building.

He said he would like to have the building ready by 2017, constructed on what is now a parking lot at the northeast corner of northeast corner of Rainbow Boulevard and 39th Street.

“When (donors) think about how they want to invest their funds,” he said, “they want to invest in an area where they are going to see some pretty tangible results. And I think it’s very easy to see a very tangible result from (the building). It will impact generations and that is something that will excite some potential donors.”

Girod also touched on other topics during the interview, including:

• How KU’s recent National Cancer Institute designation helps its education mission: “That creates a culture of clinical, intellectual curiosity that already we are seeing synergies from.”

• The burgeoning relationship between KU and Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics in Kansas City, Mo.: “The potential for that collaboration to grow the research enterprise for both of our organizations is immense and it’s wonderful clinically and it’s great for the kids and it’s great from an education perspective.”

• Status of the proposed School of Public Health: “We have had the work group looking at the combination of feasibility, structure and then financing and we are working down that list. It’s a unique school in that it will involve several campuses…which is a much more dispersed model than a lot of places. It creates challenges but it also creates opportunities because each has different strengths, in part because each sits in a different part of the state.”

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The KU School of Medicine has a few practice rooms intended to simulate for students the clinical conditions they would experience in a hospital as doctors. Mannequins can be programmed to display certain heart patterns and other conditions. Cameras are mounted in each of the practice rooms so instructors can monitor and later critiques the students' work. KU officials say a new building with more of these types of spaces that encourage learning by doing and by working in teams are needed for the school to maintain its accreditation. Dr. Glen Cox, right, is a dean at the medical school and is among the few faculty members who remember the last time the school had accreditation problems in the 1990s. by KHI News Service

The people who run the state’s only medical school say its national accreditation falls in jeopardy or is lost, if money isn’t raised for a new, $75 million structure at its Kansas City campus.

“If you're not an accredited medical school, your students can't take board examinations. Your graduates cannot get into residency programs that are accredited. And in most jurisdictions if you can't sit for your boards and you don't graduate from an accredited residency program you can't practice (medicine), you can't get a license. So accreditation is a huge deal,” said Dr. Glen Cox, the dean in charge of keeping the school OK with the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the national group that certifies medical schools.

The current education building on the school’s Kansas City campus was built in 1976 and officials here say if it isn’t obsolete it is nearly so, especially given the changes happening in the ways doctors and other health professionals are trained.

“A building built in the 1970s just can't fit the technology needs of today,” said Dr. Steven Stites, acting executive vice chancellor of the University of Kansas Medical Center, which includes the medical school. “We have a structural problem and we can’t renovate it. It would cost more to fix it up than it would to replace it.”

Lecture halls, even in the first year of study, now are considered less important to learning than small practice rooms that allow for simulations that mimic the conditions students — as doctors — will face when they encounter real patients. Also, with growing emphasis on coordinated care within the health care industry, schooling now focuses increasingly on teamwork, not just among fellow medical students but also drawing in nursing students and other health-care trainees.

The school has some spaces for that sort of teaching by doing in small groups, but not enough, according to the people in charge. The accreditation process is so meticulous, as described by Cox, that it even dictates how much private space and storage must be allowed for each resident.

Cox said he is among the few people at the medical school to remember the accreditation problems it experienced in the 1990s, a years-long ordeal he said he would prefer not to live again. And that was before he was the administrator tasked with keeping those things in order.

Need for more docs

Besides warding off accreditation woes, a new school would allow for training more doctors, KU officials said. Experts across the country for years have warned of doctor shortages that have since arrived and are growing and of the need to expand medical schools to slow or reverse that trend.

KU between 1998 and 2007, according to medical school statistics, graduated an average of about 165 medical students per year and 41 percent (an average of about 67 graduates per year) stayed in the state.

The new building would allow the school to have 25 more students per class year in Kansas City and — after counting graduates from expanded satellite campuses in Wichita and Salina — the state should see 96 new KU-trained doctors a year practicing in the state by 2016, according to projections prepared by KU. That would be a net gain of almost 30 doctors a year.

With a generation of baby-boom doctors retiring or soon to retire, many Kansas towns struggle to recruit new doctors. A disproportionate number of the doctors working in the state’s rural and underserved areas are KU graduates.

There are about 259 doctors per 100,000 U.S. residents. In Kansas, however, there are only about 213 doctors per 100,000 residents. The state also is below the national average when it comes to primary care doctors.

According to KU estimates, the state will need 213 new doctors a year by 2030 just to maintain the state’s current below-average ratio. To match the national average, it would need about 285 new doctors a year by 2030.

The tricky part

It’s been known since Coronado traipsed the Plains that gold doesn’t always turn up in Kansas. And, unfortunately, Dr. Glen Cox did not win the Lottery last week (he said), so KU is struggling to come up with a way to pay for the school building that KU and other higher education officials say it must have and that the state needs.

→ Continue reading on khi.org.

Emily Lindsley is an advanced practice registered nurse at Ellsworth County Medical Center, one of 16 member hospitals in the Sunflower Health Network. By pooling members' resources, the network was able to hire a full-time physician recruiter in February to help with the challenge of recruiting physicians and midlevel providers to rural Kansas. Ellsworth is currently looking for a family practice physician, one of eight openings at seven different hospitals in the network. by KHI News Service

Practicing medicine on the frontier in Kansas doesn't have a whole lot in common with big city medicine — so why would small town hospitals use big city physician recruiters?

Kiley Floyd said it's clear to her now that they shouldn't, but the chief executive of Osborne County Memorial Hospital learned the hard way.

"Small rural hospitals are not the same as large tertiary hospitals. Requirements of docs are different, the relationship with staff is different, the patients are different. When you're using a large recruiting firm, I learned the hard way that they don't get that. They're in it to make money," Floyd said. "We needed a good match."

The last time she used a national recruiting firm, it took two years to fill a family practice physician vacancy — and that's all the longer the doctor stayed at her north-central Kansas critical access hospital.

"The doc was not a match at all. He looked good on paper, he was a great interview, but he was not a match. He lasted a couple years," Floyd said. "He was a city guy. He'd never lived in a rural community. He thought he wanted to, but when it came down to it, he did not."

Overall her experience recruiting has been time-consuming and expensive.

"We've hired recruiters, we've done contingency firms, we tried it on our own. We've kind of run the gamut," she said. "My experience was terrible previous to Sunflower."

Things are different now.

Network recruiting

To fill the last two openings at her hospital, Floyd has enlisted the physician recruiter from the Sunflower Health Network.

The network — one of a dozen in Kansas — consists of 15 critical access hospitals that share services, pool resources and refer patients to a common hub, Salina Regional Health Center. Salina Regional first began contracting out its internal recruiter to network members in 2009.

Floyd decided to give the new recruiting service a shot, and said that in about three months she had filled the position at a third of the cost of the previous, failed effort.

"And it was a good match," Floyd said of the recruit, Dr. Dorothy Breault.

In February, the recruiter began working full time for the Sunflower network. In the last three years, eight openings at member hospitals have been filled and three more are in contract negotiations to start in 2013, said the network's executive director, Heather Fuller.

"This is a service our members wanted," Fuller said. "It's just so expensive for hospitals, especially critical access hospitals, to do on their own. It made sense to look at it from a group standpoint. It's something they all need at one point or another."

→ Continue reading on khi.org.