Medical mall project is a win for everyone

By Arthur Devine Jr.

As president of Physicians' Clinic of Iowa and a practicing urologist in Cedar Rapids for 28 years, I appreciate the opportunity to explain PCI's medical mall project. Our goals are to improve the patient health care experience and be more efficient in the delivery of that care. The medical mall concept enables PCI to achieve these goals.

One unchanging health care trend over the years has been the movement of care from hospitals into the outpatient setting. PCI is located in five separate buildings. We have tried to accommodate this trend by “back-fitting” our offices in a piecemeal fashion. This has resulted in 12 different ancillary services, ranging from x-ray to MRI to basic labs, spread over five locations.

The result of multiple locations: Our patients and families are greatly inconvenienced. This fragmented delivery of care is not patient-centered. We decided it was time to consolidate into one facility based on the patient-centered, medical mall concept.

The mall is spacious with a horizontal footprint. It includes multiple entrances, adjacent parking, and a central area through which most patients and caregivers traverse. More important, patients can visit multiple specialty physicians and obtain most evaluations in a single visit. Those specialists can easily confer about treatment plans, facilitating care.

On our initial evaluation, we concluded we could not accomplish our goal within the downtown area. This led us to investigate a large-acreage solution. At this point, city officials, both hospitals and local businesses asked us to consider staying downtown and become the catalyst project for the medical district, developed as part of the Vision Cedar Rapids plan with other interconnected theme districts.

Some people have asserted that we will simply increase our patient fees to pay for the project. Not true. Our fees are set annually by Medicare and health insurance companies. Payments to physicians have decreased by 50 percent when adjusted for inflation over the last two decades. Our main solution is to keep overhead costs down. Consolidation of our 12 ancillary services and current offices into one building helps accomplish this while also providing more coordinated and convenient care to our patients.

I've read blogs that say we can surely accomplish our goals by building skywalks. Not true. Two buildings on either side of Second Avenue, joined by a skywalk, is not the patient-focused environment we envision.

The other issue is the approximately 2,000 visitors accessing the complex daily. Many of these people are elderly, unfamiliar with traffic here, and handicapped. They will face a safety issue trying to navigate both sides of Second Avenue and 10th Street. Rerouting traffic on Second Avenue allows us to simplify this pedestrian flow and use convenient parking.

Another false assertion is that the city is spending exorbitant amounts of money to help us. We estimate PCI's taxes will increase as much as $800,000 a year - this “new” tax money will pay for the parking ramp and street enhancements and changes. PCI's project will be paid for with private funds - not, as some assert, public money that could be put to other uses.

Closing and rerouting traffic on two blocks of Second Avenue is a win, win, win. It will cause a minor traffic change for commuters.

Winners will be the city, which will be able to increase its tax base and accomplish the long-term goals of downtown economic development. PCI will win, becoming more efficient and recruiting high-quality specialists to the area.

But the big winners will be patients, who receive better-coordinated, more convenient care.

Dr. Arthur Devine Jr. is a urologist at PCI. Comments: (319) 363-8171