With four Denver hospitals planning moves to the suburbs, city and health care leaders are growing nervous the four remaining hospitals will face jammed emergency rooms and stretched resources.
“There is … the potential for risk,” Mayor John Hickenlooper said.
To address those concerns, the hospitals have enlisted Hickenlooper’s help and have begun assessing what the impact will be.
“If you can anticipate a problem, there are usually ways that are less expensive to mitigate or solve the problem,” Hickenlooper said.
Two weeks ago, the mayor rounded up executives of seven hospitals – the departing and the staying – and leaders of Kaiser Permanente to discuss the situation.
“Everyone there voiced concern and commitment to make sure their departure is not going to put any of the community at risk,” Hickenlooper said Thursday.
The University of Colorado Hospital and The Children’s Hospital plan to move to the Fitzsimons campus in Aurora beginning this fall.
The Veterans Affairs hospital will follow, although a move date has not been set.
St. Anthony Central Hospital plans to move to the site of the former federal center in Lakewood.
One result of the Feb. 7 meeting is that the Colorado Health & Hospital Association will begin research to determine which residents visit which hospitals – and how many of those residents would follow a hospital to the suburbs.
If downtown residents can’t or don’t want to move with their hospital, the impact on those remaining could be substantial, said Robert A. Minkin, chief executive of Exempla St. Joseph, one of the hospitals that will remain.
“This will be particularly poignant in trauma and emergency services,” Minkin said.
Minkin said his hospital gets about 50,000 emergency room visits a year and physically could handle about 11,000 more.
Whether the hospital could handle the impact fiscally is another matter, he said.
“The obvious concern is that those we get downtown will be disproportionately uninsured,” Minkin said.
Federal law requires hospitals to treat all emergency patients, whether or not they can pay.
Denver Health, which cares for the majority of the city’s uninsured, cannot accommodate much more emergency room traffic, hospital officials say.
While Denver Health’s emergency room visits declined 23 percent over the past five years, to 91,584 in 2006, the proportion of patients who have no insurance has grown, said spokeswoman Dee Martinez.
Last year, more than three- quarters of the people who came to the hospital’s emergency room were either covered by Medicaid or had no insurance.
In addition, a growing number of those seen in the emergency room are sick enough to be admitted, Martinez said.
The result is that the hospital is frequently as full as it can be. When that happens, the hospital has to send emergency cases elsewhere, a practice known as “divert.”
Staff writer Karen Augé can be reached at 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com.
