Mt. Lebanon Magazine: St. Clair at 70

But a more appropriate term might be suburban tertiary hospital, says St. Clair Health’s President and Chief Executive Officer Michael J. Flanagan. Most community hospitals do not have St. Clair’s high level of clinical expertise and around-the-clock availability of important providers, such as critical care and pediatric hospitalists.

“We’ve kept our focus on the community we serve, what our patients need and we’ve been able to raise the bar,” Flanagan said. That model centers on “keeping the patient the center of everything we do.”

It all started in 1941, when Mt. Lebanon physician Arthur S. Haines said the South Hills needed its own hospital. Thirteen years later, after a community-based fund drive, St. Clair Hospital opened with 104 beds and 35 bassinets.

Today, the health system that comprises the hospital is Mt. Lebanon’s largest employer, with more than 2,500 employees and 600 physicians. In addition to the hospital, it has a 135-member multi-specialty physician group, several outpatient centers and a nonprofit foundation.

St. Clair has recently made many noteworthy leaps. A few examples:

• The hospital in 2021 rebranded to St. Clair Health, emphasizing that it is a family of healthcare facilities, providers and resources.
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• As hundreds of residents fell ill, the staff navigated a global pandemic that stretched resources, working continuously through lockdowns, mask requirements and a constantly changing medical picture. Even the accounting team reported to the office. “They just rallied and put patients ahead of themselves,” Flanagan said.
• In 2016, it became the only regional member of the Mayo Clinic Care Network, allowing St. Clair access to top specialists and sub-specialists as well as guidelines for best practices, among other benefits.
• The $142 million, six-story, 280,000-square foot Dunlap Outpatient Center opened in 2021, with physicians’ offices, outpatient operating rooms and procedure areas, diagnostic facilities and cancer treatment areas. The center was the largest building project in the hospital’s history.
• Top physicians left other health systems to join St. Clair, including John T. Sullivan, MD, senior vice president and chief medical officer; Andy C. Kiser, MD, physician-in-chief of cardiovascular services; Raye Budway, MD, director of St. Clair’s Breast Care Center and chief of the Division of General Surgery, Duquesne University College of Osteopathic Medicine. “We’ve done an incredible job of recruiting,” Flanagan said.
• New facilities opened in the Bethel Park Outpatient Center including expanded medical office areas, the Breast Care Center and the region’s first 365-day urgent care office.

Big news

But the biggest news is yet to come.

“Becoming a teaching hospital is something we’re most excited about,” Flanagan said. St. Clair will have a program for medical school graduates next year and medical students in 2026. In April of this year, St. Clair received accreditation for its internal medical program from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, and will host its first group of residents next summer. In 2026, St. Clair will be a clinical training site for its first class of medical students through a partnership with the Duquesne University School of Osteopathic Medicine.

That’s especially important because a national physician shortage is one of the biggest challenges health systems face, and St. Clair is no exception. Becoming a teaching hospital will help St. Clair recruit physicians to the area and the administration believes once they see what the organization and region have to offer, they’ll want to stay. The program brings with it the need for physical changes; the hospital has begun reconfiguring underutilized areas so students and residents have a place to pursue academics when they’re not seeing patients.

Fewer than half of the physicians trained in Pennsylvania stay here, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The same group estimates that by 2032, the United States will have a shortage of 124,000 physicians. Primary care especially needs more physicians, which is why the hospital pursued the internal medicine accreditation, said Lindsay Meucci, St. Clair’s vice president of marketing, communications and advocacy.

Hospital administrators say teaching hospitals attract more physicians because many talented doctors want to teach, and may have overlooked St. Clair as a place to work to pursue that opportunity elsewhere.

Physicians aren’t the only need. St. Clair searches for quality hires in all areas, including nursing. Mercer Consulting says by 2026, Pennsylvania will lead the nation in the nursing shortage, a situation made worse by our increasing older population. St. Clair’s nursing shortage from previous years is smaller but still exists, said Flanagan. One of the ways St. Clair recruits for nursing jobs is to motivate talented staff to work toward higher levels of professional development. For example, encouraging certified nursing assistants to work toward becoming nurses.

One of the system’s best recruitment tools is its word of mouth throughout the medical community, says Erin Carlin, manager of St. Clair’s public relations and corporate communications. “Our reputation speaks for itself,” she said.

Keys to success

Meucci and Carlin both say St. Clair’s success is rooted in the reality that it’s big enough to recruit top talent but small enough to treat people like family and friends. Flanagan emphasizes the dedication of the people at St. Clair, including its board of directors, medical staff, volunteers and employees.

G. Alan Yeasted, MD, an internal medicine physician who later became a St. Clair administrator, said one of the best things about practicing there, and one of the reasons the system is successful, is the accessibility of leadership. “If you see something that needs to be fixed, you can get it fixed,” he said. Yeasted, who now is St. Clair’s senior vice president and chief medical officer emeritus and chair of the St. Clair Health Foundation Board of Directors, said St. Clair doctors feel they have the ear of the hospital president.

When the self-described “old-time doctor” first moved to Mt. Lebanon 46 years ago, Yeasted said St. Clair was more of a community hospital. If you needed a specialist, you had to go to a city hospital. Not only is the care closer to home these days, it is better because the staff is dedicated to the place where many of them live. “Everybody works together for a common goal, and it is to improve the medical care of this community,” Yeasted said. That means he may be approached in public. “You can’t go to the grocery store or a baseball game without hearing about the hospital,” he said with a laugh. “We care for the good of the community. … I’d much rather hear about it than not hear about it.”

Mt. Lebanon Municipal Manager Keith McGill believes St. Clair is a regional asset. “St. Clair Health is a great communicator and partner,” he said. “There is tremendous synergy between St. Clair and the community. As organizations, both the municipality and St. Clair embrace a model of continuous improvement. The hospital, plus everything it brings, including the professionals who come here to work and live, directly benefits Mt. Lebanon.”

The gratitude is mutual.

“Mt. Lebanon has been a very good partner with St. Clair,” Yeasted said. “We’re in a great community.”

St. Clair is important to Mt. Lebanon’s first responders. The health system provides police officers, firefighters and medics with our ambulance service, Medical Rescue Team South Authority, with flu and COVID vaccines, as well as tuberculosis testing and low-cost annual physicals. They provide our medical command for emergency transport and participate in joint emergency training opportunities. They also supply our firefighters, who now make medical calls, with important medication, such as Narcan, epinephrine and glucose. During EMS appreciation week, they hold a luncheon as well.

St. Clair officials have met in recent months with the Mt. Lebanon Police Department to discuss Mt. Lebanon’s newly added social services coordinator. Police Chief Jason Haberman says the coordinator will work with police to connect residents with mental health needs to help before the situation boils over into crisis. The hospital will also benefit as less burden is placed on its resources and capacity. Working together is important for both agencies.

Future Quality

Flanagan says the hospital does not spend time chasing awards, instead focusing on the highest quality of the right kind of care for its patients, using processes designed by employees. That allows it to pursue four goals: quality, safety, a positive patient experience and value. “If you deliver those things to your community, the ratings will work themselves out.” Indeed, St. Clair received an “A” Hospital Safety Grade, awarded semiannually from the Leapfrog Group 22 times in 12 years, putting it in exclusive company. It leads the region with the most number of “A” grades.

Quality people are important but they work best with quality processes. A transformative moment in Flanagan’s St. Clair career was after the hospital upgraded the emergency department in 2009 and then completely revamped its processes. “We were providing great care, but we weren’t as efficient as we could be,” he said. By the following year, they were named the No. 1 ER in patient experience by Press Ganey, a national healthcare performance company.

Flanagan summarizes the hospital’s goal as “To be at our best when you need us most.” He elaborates that reliably excellent care needs to be available whether it’s 2 a.m. or 2 p.m.

St. Clair accepts most major health insurance. Expect that to continue, as Flanagan said St. Clair is “committed to being open to all major payers.”

Interestingly, the future of hospital care may not be in the hospital. “Care is going to continue to shift to the outpatient setting,” Flanagan said. St. Clair recently became a leader in same-day joint replacements, has added two orthopedic surgeons who specialize in total joint replacement and has added another Da Vinci robot, which helps doctors perform minimally invasive surgeries. This summer, St. Clair partnered with Seer Medical to provide at-home diagnostic monitoring for neurology patients.

Other growth planned for the near future includes the addition of an EmPATH unit—an Emergency Psychiatric Assessment, Treatment and Healing area of 12 beds adjacent to the emergency department. Currently, the ED has 46 beds, three of which can be used for psychiatric patients. But with growing need, and other regional inpatient psychiatric units downsizing, more patients are ending up in the ER for longer periods of time. With this new unit, once a patient is evaluated and deemed safe from acute illness, they can be relocated here, Flanagan said.

The anticipation is palpable. “I think the next 10 years are going to be extremely exciting for us as a hospital,” Yeasted said of the teaching hospital plans. “To see people in white coats walking around and asking us questions. It’s a lot of work and responsibility. I give our board a lot of credit.”

Flanagan agrees. “There’s a lot of good things on the horizon here.”

Resource: https://lebomag.com/st-clair-at-70/

First Published August 23, 2024