All three county commissioners can be reached by emailing the Clerk of the Board at Loni.Gores@clallamcountywa.gov. Sent today:
Dear Commissioners,
Two years ago this Board formally urged voters to approve Olympic Medical Center’s levy lid lift. Voters agreed. Property-tax collections for Hospital District 2 more than doubled.
A newly released consultant assessment now says the larger problem was operations: clinic schedules filled only about two-thirds of the time, long waits for new patients, underused buildings the public already owns, and other efficiencies that could have produced tens of millions a year if they had been pursued. Extra tax revenue does not book an empty appointment slot.
What is your message to the voters who trusted that resolution and paid the increase? The record does not show that taxpayers were stingy. It shows that OMC did not tighten its belt, and this Board treated a tax hike as the answer instead of insisting on those operational fixes first.
Please provide a public response on what this Board now expects of OMC before any further increase in collections.
Wow i wondered when the real story would come out. Jeff you did your homework and gave us a fair assessment of the financial mismanagement that has created this cash cow. The OMC is going to fail as long as they are not profitable without all the extra cash they collect. A normal business would have went bankrupt by now. I have been in the hospital a few times and the personnel have an attitude that is terrible. (Not everyone) They know what is going down. Drs, leaving isa good sign of trouble internally. No heart or diabetic specialists so to speak. If u need heart operation no can do at OMC. We have a hospital that is not fully practical in today’s world.Throwing money at a sinking ship is not the answer. Fixing the leak would be a good start
Heart surgery, whether open heart or cardiac catheterization, will never be practicable in a small rural hospital. The cost of specialized staffing and equipment for pre, intra and post op care requires a large volume to justify the expense and I doubt that the County can produce that volume. Like some other services, e.g. neurosurgery, the county will have to send those cases out. Agree that it is certainly not ideal when time is of the essence.
"Consultants are people who borrow your watch, tell you what time it is, and then walk off with your watch (and charge you a huge fee for it)." We, the taxpayers, also pay for the consultants.
Thank you for the new theme song; a watchdog tribute to Dolly! And thank you to the person behind this article!
As I shared in my Sequim Monitor article the other day, whenever timber sales are stopped or stalled, the beneficiaries — the people — lose out. Timber sales help fund the hospital. The Fishhook sale is projected to bring in $140,900. And that is only one sale. There are multiple timber parcel sales that happen throughout the year. https://sequimmonitor.substack.com/p/cutting-services-saving-trees-and
$140k won’t solve all the problems, but that’s not what it’s about. That is money legally owed to the beneficiaries of the timber sales, meaning the services that the people rely on. Those sales lessen the financial burden on the taxpayers.
Ninety years ago, a county chairman projected a future where county residents wouldn’t be paying taxes due to sales from timber. That has not happened, and the people in charge today are destroying what was built for the people every time they put conservation above timber sales.
Conservation is part of the laws. The Fishhook timber parcel will leave behind 109 acres of conserved land, with trees, wetlands, and all the stuff conservationists love; that’s leaving $1 million that will never fund county services. Trees are already being saved through the laws; what isn’t being saved is OMC and the taxpayers who are footing the bill due to elected officials who don’t value the people as much as they value renewable trees.
No matter how much $$$ is in the yearly budget operation manager will find ways to spend it all by the end of the year and then plea for more.Gullable voters need to quit believing wasteful spenders cries for help $$$.The old hospital wasteful spender that had to resign because of 'personal reasons'was spending buku $$$ on surplus property and when audit revealed he had spent all surplus $$$ then it was time to move on before accountability actions could take place.Hospital staff & others gave wasteful spender a happy fairwell party for doing such a good job and assured him he will be missed for doing such a good job LOL.
Understaffed as usual, doctors are leaving, primary care doctors are leaving, this doesn't surprise me at all. People who work there do their very best, for the patients, for each other, but it only goes so far when the issues are dripping from the top, I worked there for a time. Now I won't work in any hospital setting ever again, and that should tell you sonething.
Thank you for the update, Jeff. OMC is in financial trouble, but we taxpayers can't be its only source of a bailout. Kaufman Hall's suggestions are basic. The Board could have have saved the hospital time and money and implemented the obvious on its own. Unless someone takes a courageous lead and remains focused on the hard work needed to save it, OMC will never recover and will be lost.
They are probably self insured. More losses! Thanks Jim there it is poor management and not taking care of employees. This is a train wreck gone bad. What else lies ahead that we don’t know about?
It is so common in medicine for the staff to not get official breaks. Comes with the job. It's does not necesarilly mean the work is nonstop like in retail or foodworkers. With the data Jeff just shared showing how 68% of schedules not filled across the board...seems like plenty of downtime to be on your phone or chat with fellow workers. If there goal however is to fill the schedules to 85%....that is going to increase the stress on the staff and clinicians. OMC has been a revolving door for a lot of specialists and primary care....they often leave when their contract us up. Cramming their schedules will only accelerate this....especially in primary care where the extra-patient work burdon is already high.
I worked in nursing at a big city medical center. Yes, management did get caught routinely shorting staff hours, requiring double shifts, denying breaks. Someone would complain to the state, management would fess up, the employees would get compensated, life would go on. But that doesn’t make it right. I hope OMC settles.
I'm going to push back a little on one point Jeff. This is similar to our podcast that we did a couple years ago...
I agree with Nutter (R.I.P.) that the Board should have taken the 1% last year.
As a board member for a different agency/taxing district, the legally allowed amount should be taken every year. That is what allows the district budget to keep up with inflation.
When inflation is 3% and the legally allowed increase is 1%, the district still falls behind, but it allows the fall to be slower. This is why Jr taxing districts have to constantly come back to voters for lid lifts, to bring the income back to what the 1% limit has chipped away at during years where inflation was higher than 1%, which is pretty much every year.
If inflation is less than 1%, the taxing districts can only increase by whatever the inflation rate is. If inflation is negative, than there is zero increase that year.
I had a conversation with a now former hospital commissioner when the OMC Board was debating to run their lid lift. My opinion was that the OMC Board should have never waited for the effective levy amount to get that low before running a lid lift.
For the district that I am a member of the board (FD 3), we basically have to run our lid lifts every 3-5 years just to keep up with operational costs and reset for what inflation took away. This is the quirky way that WA tax policy is different than every other state where I have lived and payed taxes. This is where the voters get to choose what level of service they want. When costs exceed the income from taxes, services have to be cut. We don't have much of a buffer to sustain service when costs exceed income.
OMC has many more potential income streams than the fire district does, but leaving their tax levy money on the table was a bad move, especially for a hospital that is struggling as much as they are.
Struggling ? They don’t have a chance of recovering. They don’t have a plan but to get more money from taxpayers. Spend it wisely and they wouldn’t be broke
Poor oversight of hospital managers resulted in over expansion and increased cost which resulted in unmanageable debt. While the board is not directly involved in managing day to day operations, it has a responsibility to hire competent managers and require financial responsibility.
Rumors survive on a kernel of truth, and lies travel fastest when they’re dressed in it. The Watchdog relies on that trick constantly. The consultant report is a technical document about rural hospital operations. The Watchdog article carves it into a morality play about local incompetence, and the podcast transforms it further into a traveling monologue about Portland sidewalks, harm reduction conspiracies, and personal vendettas. None of that changes the underlying facts.
Kaufman Hall didn’t say OMC was mismanaged. They said OMC is a rural hospital with a heavy Medicare/Medicaid payer mix, flat population growth, specialty shortages, and the same post pandemic labor inflation every rural system is dealing with. They laid out a path to stabilize operations, improve access, and rebuild financial footing. They didn’t say the 2024 levy was a mistake. They didn’t say taxpayers had been fleeced. They didn’t say schedulers were incompetent. They didn’t say empty clinic slots were the result of laziness. They said OMC needs better care team design, better referral management, better documentation integrity, and a partnership with UW Medicine to get the scale it can’t generate on its own.
The Watchdog story strips all of that out. It treats the 67% provider utilization rate as proof that someone forgot to pick up the phone, when the real issue is that rural hospitals can’t hire enough providers to fill the templates in the first place. It treats the 1% levy adjustment as a greedy tax grab, when in an inflationary environment it’s actually a real dollar cut. It treats the sale leaseback proposal as a cash grab conspiracy, when it’s a standard liquidity maneuver used by hospitals, airports, universities, and corporations everywhere.
You can tell the Watchdog has never actually dealt with public sector documents, because it treats every black bar like the opening scene of a conspiracy thriller. In reality, those redactions are the same dull things that get blacked out everywhere: proprietary financial formulas, draft negotiation numbers, and the kind of early stage real estate details that you don’t publish unless you want half the county speculating themselves into a bidding frenzy and jacking up the price. It’s not a cover up. It’s just the hospital trying not to sabotage its own negotiations by handing out the cheat codes in advance.
The podcast goes even further. It drags in Portland street scenes, Peabody anecdotes, OPCC contract insinuations, and a long detour about being portrayed as a dog eating human feces in a local play. It’s all very dramatic, but none of it has anything to do with the Kaufman Hall report or the actual challenges facing a rural hospital trying to stay afloat in a difficult market.
The real story is much simpler. OMC has structural problems that every rural hospital has. Kaufman Hall gave them a roadmap to fix what can be fixed, partner where they need help, and stabilize operations over the next few years. It’s not a scandal. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not a morality tale. It’s a hospital trying to survive.
And after listening to the podcast’s theatrics, the redaction conspiracies, the Portland comparisons, and the martyrdom monologue about being turned into a dog who eats human feces on stage, I finally realized something. Jeff keeps insisting he was portrayed unfairly. But satire only exaggerates what’s already there. And in his case, it’s simple: You are what you eat.
It's been a while, Powdermonkey—great to have you back in the conversation!
I guess those very 'theatrics' are what brought you back into the comment section, which proves the point perfectly. Even if some view the Watchdog’s style as sensational, it serves as a pivotal lever for local checks and balances by transforming dry, administrative documents into active public interest. That friction is exactly what drives constituent engagement and pulls deep, analytical thinkers like yourself out of the sidelines and into the civic arena.
I’ve actually been here the whole time. Theatrics didn’t ‘bring me back', they just made the misinformation louder. My point wasn’t that the Watchdog is engaging; it’s that it’s distorting. Turning a consultant report into a conspiracy monologue isn’t civic engagement, it’s content. If people step in to correct the record, that’s not proof the theatrics are effective. It’s proof they’re misleading.
Nothing you said pushes back on PM’s consistent claim that CCWD manufactures the friction and relies on that manufacturing to get consistent engagement. Re-reading your comment, I think you actually understand this perfectly.
Also, a tip on Substack: you can see the replies and likes from users by going to their profile. Check out PM’s articles or their maaaaaany other comments across CCWD posts. I agree that PM is a deep, analytical thinker. I would add that they frequently push back on the aforementioned sensationalism with both reason and humor.
If a business claims they "made" money, yet most of the made money was from sources not involving health care, actual day to day work, then they DID NOT make money.
This hospital needs to do a much better job managing thenselves, while cities, states , counties need to take a close look at who is getting the freebies that keep the hospital so busy. And why. That tells the whole story, the one no one wants to talk about. Taxpayers on the hook again, while knowing if you need emergency care or are accompanying someone to emergency care, you will spend a minimum of 6-9 hours in the ER waiting for someone to tell you what they want you to do. Stay or go. What am I paying for, exactly? I pay, I wait BEHIND those that do not. Pretty much the same with all my property tax expenses.
To me it looks like bad hospital administrators-CEO's that have abused the hospitals budgets and are starting to come under fire just resign and trade places with other bad CEO's in other counties doing the same.Board members that hire these culprits need to do some background history before hiring.School districts supervisors have a similar issue.
Amen. As a former OMP employee, I can tell you that some of those buildings are empty or almost empty. OMC sits on them for no reason or holds out for "someday" fantasies. OMC/OMP throws a few employees into some of them to help justify keeping them. They purchased Dr. Clancy's former building at Race and Georgianna and threw Employee Health in there; that's just 4-5 people who could operate anywhere. They purchased the Wells Fargo building to help with the COVID response issues and when that was over, they fantasized about putting a pharmacy in there -- but my understanding is that they can hardly staff the pharmacy they have in the main hospital building. The Cherry and 8th streets clinic building houses OMP Education (employee education) which could just as easily go to the MOB basement along with a couple of medical records people who should probably join their OMC colleagues in the main hospital basement. There are many vacant or almost vacant buildings. Don't lease them back. Just sell them and do something useful with the revenues, like increasing cash reserves or paying down debt.
I wonder how many buildings could be sold off if some staff went remote i.e. work from home. Of course, not everyone can do this in a hospital environment. Central schedulers can. Billing folks can some technical and support folks can. if there are technical trainers, they can as well. Even with a small technical stipend paid to remote folks can save a boatload of money on infrastructure. no more heating, cooling, maintaining these buildings. Sell them off and put the money where it’s needed. Even some nursing positions (advice, discharge planning)can be converted to remote work. There’s nothing that says that remote work needs to be overseas, these can be required to live in the area paid at a competitive wage. even these small steps can translate to more effective use of the infrastructure already in place.
I worked in Medical Records for a couple of years after my position was terminated at the PDN. Converting paper records to electronic ones requires employees to work in a secure areas that the public doesn't access. I'm sure there are other departments that would be prohibited from accessing medical records off-site. There have to be some jobs that should be allowed access to EPIC electronic health records off-site, though.
Definitely. I currently work remotely for a healthcare organization. Our entire IT dept is remote. Our schedulers and case and utilization managers are also remote.
The other lie they circulate about all their real estate is that selling them wouldn't bring in that much cash. Whether that's true or not, I doubt it. OMC is so broke they need to invent a new word to describe it. They can't justify holding on to real estate when they're this broke.
One more thing: I'll betcha that Commissioner Stephanz would love to add the former Clancy building to the VIMO clinic right next door -- more services to the homeless, etc.
I am reluctant to use POTUS as an example for OMC management because of TDR and the hackles he raises on any person with a liberal lean, but it fits. Medical management comes from within the medical hierarchy much like our Presidents typically coming from a similar line of grooming. Trump breaks that mold and I for one believe that has helped the U.S.A. immensely. Someone without a Doctorate in medicine but proven management skills may be just what OMC needs. Doctors and nurses do not like to be considered union members, but most are. The AMA and the NNU are both unions; though the AMA would argue otherwise. Unions have a talent for rewarding under achievement and not rewarding exceptional achievement. Management that sees OMC as a business, rather than some existing tool within history's medical hierarchy, represents great potential. Remember the definition of insanity.
Sell it. Get rid of it. Let someone who knows how the run a hospital buy it.
Nothing worse than going to work every day for a business teetering on the brink of collapse. Moral goes down. Quality people leave. You suffer high turnover and your patients get worse care. Pretty soon something happens that’s catastrophic and who pays? We pay!
All three county commissioners can be reached by emailing the Clerk of the Board at Loni.Gores@clallamcountywa.gov. Sent today:
Dear Commissioners,
Two years ago this Board formally urged voters to approve Olympic Medical Center’s levy lid lift. Voters agreed. Property-tax collections for Hospital District 2 more than doubled.
A newly released consultant assessment now says the larger problem was operations: clinic schedules filled only about two-thirds of the time, long waits for new patients, underused buildings the public already owns, and other efficiencies that could have produced tens of millions a year if they had been pursued. Extra tax revenue does not book an empty appointment slot.
What is your message to the voters who trusted that resolution and paid the increase? The record does not show that taxpayers were stingy. It shows that OMC did not tighten its belt, and this Board treated a tax hike as the answer instead of insisting on those operational fixes first.
Please provide a public response on what this Board now expects of OMC before any further increase in collections.
Our tax dollars for OMC to be an REIT? What? Real estate investment trust? No! Invest in PA buildings in a downtown kommissars are killing. Insanity.
Poor management is not corrected with more money! We need competent leaders in CC.
Wow i wondered when the real story would come out. Jeff you did your homework and gave us a fair assessment of the financial mismanagement that has created this cash cow. The OMC is going to fail as long as they are not profitable without all the extra cash they collect. A normal business would have went bankrupt by now. I have been in the hospital a few times and the personnel have an attitude that is terrible. (Not everyone) They know what is going down. Drs, leaving isa good sign of trouble internally. No heart or diabetic specialists so to speak. If u need heart operation no can do at OMC. We have a hospital that is not fully practical in today’s world.Throwing money at a sinking ship is not the answer. Fixing the leak would be a good start
Heart surgery, whether open heart or cardiac catheterization, will never be practicable in a small rural hospital. The cost of specialized staffing and equipment for pre, intra and post op care requires a large volume to justify the expense and I doubt that the County can produce that volume. Like some other services, e.g. neurosurgery, the county will have to send those cases out. Agree that it is certainly not ideal when time is of the essence.
Dale Tu for your reply. I am happy with my Silverdale connections for specialty Docs. I just think OMC could be better run than it is
Agree. Management could do better.
"Consultants are people who borrow your watch, tell you what time it is, and then walk off with your watch (and charge you a huge fee for it)." We, the taxpayers, also pay for the consultants.
These solutions are basic knowledge that any OMC Board member and CFO could produce on their own. More money wasted on frivolous outside companies.
Thank you for the new theme song; a watchdog tribute to Dolly! And thank you to the person behind this article!
As I shared in my Sequim Monitor article the other day, whenever timber sales are stopped or stalled, the beneficiaries — the people — lose out. Timber sales help fund the hospital. The Fishhook sale is projected to bring in $140,900. And that is only one sale. There are multiple timber parcel sales that happen throughout the year. https://sequimmonitor.substack.com/p/cutting-services-saving-trees-and
$140k won’t solve all the problems, but that’s not what it’s about. That is money legally owed to the beneficiaries of the timber sales, meaning the services that the people rely on. Those sales lessen the financial burden on the taxpayers.
Ninety years ago, a county chairman projected a future where county residents wouldn’t be paying taxes due to sales from timber. That has not happened, and the people in charge today are destroying what was built for the people every time they put conservation above timber sales.
Conservation is part of the laws. The Fishhook timber parcel will leave behind 109 acres of conserved land, with trees, wetlands, and all the stuff conservationists love; that’s leaving $1 million that will never fund county services. Trees are already being saved through the laws; what isn’t being saved is OMC and the taxpayers who are footing the bill due to elected officials who don’t value the people as much as they value renewable trees.
No matter how much $$$ is in the yearly budget operation manager will find ways to spend it all by the end of the year and then plea for more.Gullable voters need to quit believing wasteful spenders cries for help $$$.The old hospital wasteful spender that had to resign because of 'personal reasons'was spending buku $$$ on surplus property and when audit revealed he had spent all surplus $$$ then it was time to move on before accountability actions could take place.Hospital staff & others gave wasteful spender a happy fairwell party for doing such a good job and assured him he will be missed for doing such a good job LOL.
Understaffed as usual, doctors are leaving, primary care doctors are leaving, this doesn't surprise me at all. People who work there do their very best, for the patients, for each other, but it only goes so far when the issues are dripping from the top, I worked there for a time. Now I won't work in any hospital setting ever again, and that should tell you sonething.
Thank you for the update, Jeff. OMC is in financial trouble, but we taxpayers can't be its only source of a bailout. Kaufman Hall's suggestions are basic. The Board could have have saved the hospital time and money and implemented the obvious on its own. Unless someone takes a courageous lead and remains focused on the hard work needed to save it, OMC will never recover and will be lost.
And OMC is getting sued. Check it out. https://olympicherald.substack.com/p/olympic-medical-center-hit-with-class?r=agbmo&utm_medium=ios
They are probably self insured. More losses! Thanks Jim there it is poor management and not taking care of employees. This is a train wreck gone bad. What else lies ahead that we don’t know about?
It is so common in medicine for the staff to not get official breaks. Comes with the job. It's does not necesarilly mean the work is nonstop like in retail or foodworkers. With the data Jeff just shared showing how 68% of schedules not filled across the board...seems like plenty of downtime to be on your phone or chat with fellow workers. If there goal however is to fill the schedules to 85%....that is going to increase the stress on the staff and clinicians. OMC has been a revolving door for a lot of specialists and primary care....they often leave when their contract us up. Cramming their schedules will only accelerate this....especially in primary care where the extra-patient work burdon is already high.
I worked in nursing at a big city medical center. Yes, management did get caught routinely shorting staff hours, requiring double shifts, denying breaks. Someone would complain to the state, management would fess up, the employees would get compensated, life would go on. But that doesn’t make it right. I hope OMC settles.
I'm going to push back a little on one point Jeff. This is similar to our podcast that we did a couple years ago...
I agree with Nutter (R.I.P.) that the Board should have taken the 1% last year.
As a board member for a different agency/taxing district, the legally allowed amount should be taken every year. That is what allows the district budget to keep up with inflation.
When inflation is 3% and the legally allowed increase is 1%, the district still falls behind, but it allows the fall to be slower. This is why Jr taxing districts have to constantly come back to voters for lid lifts, to bring the income back to what the 1% limit has chipped away at during years where inflation was higher than 1%, which is pretty much every year.
If inflation is less than 1%, the taxing districts can only increase by whatever the inflation rate is. If inflation is negative, than there is zero increase that year.
I had a conversation with a now former hospital commissioner when the OMC Board was debating to run their lid lift. My opinion was that the OMC Board should have never waited for the effective levy amount to get that low before running a lid lift.
For the district that I am a member of the board (FD 3), we basically have to run our lid lifts every 3-5 years just to keep up with operational costs and reset for what inflation took away. This is the quirky way that WA tax policy is different than every other state where I have lived and payed taxes. This is where the voters get to choose what level of service they want. When costs exceed the income from taxes, services have to be cut. We don't have much of a buffer to sustain service when costs exceed income.
OMC has many more potential income streams than the fire district does, but leaving their tax levy money on the table was a bad move, especially for a hospital that is struggling as much as they are.
Struggling ? They don’t have a chance of recovering. They don’t have a plan but to get more money from taxpayers. Spend it wisely and they wouldn’t be broke
The hospital board of commissioners is answerable to us. We are responsible for paying attention to board decisions and raising our concerns.
Poor oversight of hospital managers resulted in over expansion and increased cost which resulted in unmanageable debt. While the board is not directly involved in managing day to day operations, it has a responsibility to hire competent managers and require financial responsibility.
Rumors survive on a kernel of truth, and lies travel fastest when they’re dressed in it. The Watchdog relies on that trick constantly. The consultant report is a technical document about rural hospital operations. The Watchdog article carves it into a morality play about local incompetence, and the podcast transforms it further into a traveling monologue about Portland sidewalks, harm reduction conspiracies, and personal vendettas. None of that changes the underlying facts.
Kaufman Hall didn’t say OMC was mismanaged. They said OMC is a rural hospital with a heavy Medicare/Medicaid payer mix, flat population growth, specialty shortages, and the same post pandemic labor inflation every rural system is dealing with. They laid out a path to stabilize operations, improve access, and rebuild financial footing. They didn’t say the 2024 levy was a mistake. They didn’t say taxpayers had been fleeced. They didn’t say schedulers were incompetent. They didn’t say empty clinic slots were the result of laziness. They said OMC needs better care team design, better referral management, better documentation integrity, and a partnership with UW Medicine to get the scale it can’t generate on its own.
The Watchdog story strips all of that out. It treats the 67% provider utilization rate as proof that someone forgot to pick up the phone, when the real issue is that rural hospitals can’t hire enough providers to fill the templates in the first place. It treats the 1% levy adjustment as a greedy tax grab, when in an inflationary environment it’s actually a real dollar cut. It treats the sale leaseback proposal as a cash grab conspiracy, when it’s a standard liquidity maneuver used by hospitals, airports, universities, and corporations everywhere.
You can tell the Watchdog has never actually dealt with public sector documents, because it treats every black bar like the opening scene of a conspiracy thriller. In reality, those redactions are the same dull things that get blacked out everywhere: proprietary financial formulas, draft negotiation numbers, and the kind of early stage real estate details that you don’t publish unless you want half the county speculating themselves into a bidding frenzy and jacking up the price. It’s not a cover up. It’s just the hospital trying not to sabotage its own negotiations by handing out the cheat codes in advance.
The podcast goes even further. It drags in Portland street scenes, Peabody anecdotes, OPCC contract insinuations, and a long detour about being portrayed as a dog eating human feces in a local play. It’s all very dramatic, but none of it has anything to do with the Kaufman Hall report or the actual challenges facing a rural hospital trying to stay afloat in a difficult market.
The real story is much simpler. OMC has structural problems that every rural hospital has. Kaufman Hall gave them a roadmap to fix what can be fixed, partner where they need help, and stabilize operations over the next few years. It’s not a scandal. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not a morality tale. It’s a hospital trying to survive.
And after listening to the podcast’s theatrics, the redaction conspiracies, the Portland comparisons, and the martyrdom monologue about being turned into a dog who eats human feces on stage, I finally realized something. Jeff keeps insisting he was portrayed unfairly. But satire only exaggerates what’s already there. And in his case, it’s simple: You are what you eat.
It's been a while, Powdermonkey—great to have you back in the conversation!
I guess those very 'theatrics' are what brought you back into the comment section, which proves the point perfectly. Even if some view the Watchdog’s style as sensational, it serves as a pivotal lever for local checks and balances by transforming dry, administrative documents into active public interest. That friction is exactly what drives constituent engagement and pulls deep, analytical thinkers like yourself out of the sidelines and into the civic arena.
I’ve actually been here the whole time. Theatrics didn’t ‘bring me back', they just made the misinformation louder. My point wasn’t that the Watchdog is engaging; it’s that it’s distorting. Turning a consultant report into a conspiracy monologue isn’t civic engagement, it’s content. If people step in to correct the record, that’s not proof the theatrics are effective. It’s proof they’re misleading.
Nothing you said pushes back on PM’s consistent claim that CCWD manufactures the friction and relies on that manufacturing to get consistent engagement. Re-reading your comment, I think you actually understand this perfectly.
Also, a tip on Substack: you can see the replies and likes from users by going to their profile. Check out PM’s articles or their maaaaaany other comments across CCWD posts. I agree that PM is a deep, analytical thinker. I would add that they frequently push back on the aforementioned sensationalism with both reason and humor.
If I could "like" this more than once, I would. Thanks for the laugh!
If a business claims they "made" money, yet most of the made money was from sources not involving health care, actual day to day work, then they DID NOT make money.
This hospital needs to do a much better job managing thenselves, while cities, states , counties need to take a close look at who is getting the freebies that keep the hospital so busy. And why. That tells the whole story, the one no one wants to talk about. Taxpayers on the hook again, while knowing if you need emergency care or are accompanying someone to emergency care, you will spend a minimum of 6-9 hours in the ER waiting for someone to tell you what they want you to do. Stay or go. What am I paying for, exactly? I pay, I wait BEHIND those that do not. Pretty much the same with all my property tax expenses.
To me it looks like bad hospital administrators-CEO's that have abused the hospitals budgets and are starting to come under fire just resign and trade places with other bad CEO's in other counties doing the same.Board members that hire these culprits need to do some background history before hiring.School districts supervisors have a similar issue.
Sign on bounces and severance pay.
Why rent those excess properties back? Isn’t there a market for them without a guaranteed renter? Seems they aren’t needed. Careful.
Amen. As a former OMP employee, I can tell you that some of those buildings are empty or almost empty. OMC sits on them for no reason or holds out for "someday" fantasies. OMC/OMP throws a few employees into some of them to help justify keeping them. They purchased Dr. Clancy's former building at Race and Georgianna and threw Employee Health in there; that's just 4-5 people who could operate anywhere. They purchased the Wells Fargo building to help with the COVID response issues and when that was over, they fantasized about putting a pharmacy in there -- but my understanding is that they can hardly staff the pharmacy they have in the main hospital building. The Cherry and 8th streets clinic building houses OMP Education (employee education) which could just as easily go to the MOB basement along with a couple of medical records people who should probably join their OMC colleagues in the main hospital basement. There are many vacant or almost vacant buildings. Don't lease them back. Just sell them and do something useful with the revenues, like increasing cash reserves or paying down debt.
I wonder how many buildings could be sold off if some staff went remote i.e. work from home. Of course, not everyone can do this in a hospital environment. Central schedulers can. Billing folks can some technical and support folks can. if there are technical trainers, they can as well. Even with a small technical stipend paid to remote folks can save a boatload of money on infrastructure. no more heating, cooling, maintaining these buildings. Sell them off and put the money where it’s needed. Even some nursing positions (advice, discharge planning)can be converted to remote work. There’s nothing that says that remote work needs to be overseas, these can be required to live in the area paid at a competitive wage. even these small steps can translate to more effective use of the infrastructure already in place.
I worked in Medical Records for a couple of years after my position was terminated at the PDN. Converting paper records to electronic ones requires employees to work in a secure areas that the public doesn't access. I'm sure there are other departments that would be prohibited from accessing medical records off-site. There have to be some jobs that should be allowed access to EPIC electronic health records off-site, though.
Definitely. I currently work remotely for a healthcare organization. Our entire IT dept is remote. Our schedulers and case and utilization managers are also remote.
The other lie they circulate about all their real estate is that selling them wouldn't bring in that much cash. Whether that's true or not, I doubt it. OMC is so broke they need to invent a new word to describe it. They can't justify holding on to real estate when they're this broke.
One more thing: I'll betcha that Commissioner Stephanz would love to add the former Clancy building to the VIMO clinic right next door -- more services to the homeless, etc.
I am reluctant to use POTUS as an example for OMC management because of TDR and the hackles he raises on any person with a liberal lean, but it fits. Medical management comes from within the medical hierarchy much like our Presidents typically coming from a similar line of grooming. Trump breaks that mold and I for one believe that has helped the U.S.A. immensely. Someone without a Doctorate in medicine but proven management skills may be just what OMC needs. Doctors and nurses do not like to be considered union members, but most are. The AMA and the NNU are both unions; though the AMA would argue otherwise. Unions have a talent for rewarding under achievement and not rewarding exceptional achievement. Management that sees OMC as a business, rather than some existing tool within history's medical hierarchy, represents great potential. Remember the definition of insanity.
Sell it. Get rid of it. Let someone who knows how the run a hospital buy it.
Nothing worse than going to work every day for a business teetering on the brink of collapse. Moral goes down. Quality people leave. You suffer high turnover and your patients get worse care. Pretty soon something happens that’s catastrophic and who pays? We pay!
Sell it. Yesterday was not soon enough.