Pauls Valley’s hospital opened for business as Southern Plains Medical Center of Garvin County on April 28 with little fanfare.
The low-key nature of its first three months have been by design, hospital CEO Richard Mathis said.
The challenges of reopening a full-service hospital facility that has been closed for nearly two and a half years, including hiring a completely new staff, required an adjustment period.
“We brought 70 people on board and did that all at once. We needed to allow us to find our legs, and pretty much have everyone in the building get associated and get to know the others,” Mathis said. “It’s not like we had a full, running hospital, where we just added a new employee here and there. Our biggest investment is in employees. We’ve invested and invested well in our staff here.”
The adjustment period has also allowed the facility to work on completing the accreditation process for Medicare and Medicaid. That process is based in part on patient care, requiring a facility to be open and seeing patients to qualify.
Mathis said the facility is required to see a certain number of patients come through as in-patients, primarily in the emergency department.
“The numbers were about where we expected them, if not better, during that process,” Mathis said. “We were trying to make sure we didn’t have a flood of patients before we were prepared to handle that firehose coming at us,” Mathis said.
Mathis said the hospital has treated about 1,700 patients since the April opening. Those patients have been seen through the emergency department, outpatient radiology (which includes X-ray, CT scan, and ultrasound) and the hospital’s lab.
In the emergency department, Mathis said staff have already had the opportunity to intercede in seven to 10 situations where the presence of a local ER potentially saved lives.
The hospital’s emergency department is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with trauma trained providers, Mathis said. There are also transfer agreements in place with OU Medical, Integris, Norman Regional, Mercy and St. Anthony’s hospitals.
The hospital has a 43-bed capacity for those patients who require admission. Currently, the facility is averaging about 3 full beds a day with an average patient stay of 3 to 4 days, according to Mathis.
Southern Plains has also invested $800,000 in lab equipment, which will allow more tests to be completed onsite, resulting in improved patient care.
“We send out relatively no tests. We’re pretty much self-contained, which is unheard of. Most rural hospitals will have a reference lab. We have that capability. The next step that we’re taking is we will be a reference lab here,” Mathis said.
The next phase for SPMC of Garvin County will entail adding diabetes and wound care specialties and then eventually rehabilitation services, including physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy, and elective surgeries.
Mathis, who has spent the majority of his 30-year career saving distressed hospitals in rural areas, said he has run successful hospitals in much smaller communities, and he has great confidence in the $10 million investment that has been made in SPMC of Garvin County.
“There’s a great opportunity here. We will realize it, and the community will benefit from that,” Mathis said. “The best way to take care of yourself (in business) is to keep a clean, black bottom line. We’ve got one agenda: to take care of patients.”
