I couldn’t reach Dr. Francois Lacour-Gayet on Wednesday. He was scheduled for 10 hours of surgery and couldn’t come to the phone.
He’s a professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and the chairman of the cardiac surgery department at the Children’s Hospital Heart Institute who makes $750,000 a year, which by most standards is a lot of money.
Since I couldn’t reach Lacour-Gayet, I called his boss, UCHSC dean Richard Krugman, to ask him where all this money comes from. I wanted to hold his feet to the fire.
He was ready for me. I just hate that.
It turns out that Lacour-Gayet was recruited to CU and Children’s in 2002 after a very dark period.
In 2000, The Denver Post revealed that the fatality rate for open-heart surgery at Children’s Hospital was high. Over a 3 1/2-year period, approximately 30 of the 710 children who underwent open-heart surgery there died. The mortality rate was 4.2 percent, compared with the national average of 2.7 percent.
“People thought our cardiothoracic surgery should be better,” Krugman said.
They sure did. In fact, the medical community was so upset about the situation that pediatric cardiologists stopped referring children to cardiac surgeons here, sending them instead to Boston and San Francisco.
Not long after the problem at Children’s surfaced, the chief of cardiac surgery resigned. The department’s reputation was in free fall.
“We decided we needed to recruit the very best pediatric cardiology surgeon we could find,” Krugman said.
An international search took nearly two years, but when they signed Lacour-Gayet, it was something of a coup.
Educated in France, Lacour-Gayet had trained with the heart-transplant team at Loma Linda University in California. He had created a department of pediatric cardiac surgery at Eppendorf University Hospital in Hamburg, Germany. And he had achieved international renown for developing a program to assess the risk of surgery in fragile infants and save lives.
“He also has developed techniques for open-heart surgery on newborns and 1-week-old infants. In the past, we had no choice but to stand back and watch them die,” Krugman said. “He’s an extraordinary teacher and one of the best pediatric cardiac surgeons in the world.”
OK. So he’s good.
It’s still a lot of money.
Yes it is, said Krugman, although a recent compensation survey by the Medical Group Management Association found pediatric cardiac surgeons at most major medical centers bring in between $1 million and $1.5 million a year.
UCHSC records show that Lacour-Gayet’s compensation is from several sources: $75,000 from Children’s Hospital for his work as chairman of the department, $479,493 from clinical services (surgeries performed), $190,865 from private practice, $2,786 from university funds generated from tuition and $1,856 from Colorado taxpayers through the state general fund.
The records show Lacour-Gayet’s fingerprints all over much larger sums, however.
Last year, he and two junior faculty associates brought the state $8,303,982 in research grants. In addition, the total clinical revenue for the pediatric cardiothoracic faculty practice was $1,856,783. This is because instead of sending Colorado babies to San Francisco and Boston for open-heart surgery, now babies from across the country come here, where the mortality rate now is below the national average.
While Lacour-Gayet is internationally renowned, he’s hardly exceptional when it comes to bringing in big bucks. Krugman said most of the professors at the medical school are good at that. “For every dollar we get from the state, we generate $98.40 of other income,” he said.
Oh, one more thing: Lacour-Gayet’s income from taxpayers has dropped.
This year, the expert in neonatal cardiac surgery, complex biventricular repair, fontan circulation, heart transplantation, minimal invasive surgery and quality of care evaluation will get the princely sum of $1,749 from the state general fund.
I thought you should know.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
