Letting grateful patients help out

By Gary Seamans

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A June 10 Des Moines Register story (“U of I sharing patient details with fundraiser”) might have prompted some readers, maybe for the first time, to wonder about the following:

l Why does the University of Iowa engage in patient-based fundraising?

l Is this kind of fundraising ethical?

These are good questions worthy of honest answers.

My wife and family have been grateful patients of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics for years and I am proud to serve, along with my wife, as an advisory board member of the renowned UI Institute for Vision Research (IVR). As a result of my confidence in UIHC care - and my hope for the future medical research conducted there - my wife and I have established an endowed chair in the Department of Ophthalmology.

I also serve on the UI Foundation board of directors and I know how thoughtfully the grateful patient initiative has been planned and executed - with great care, attention to patient privacy and sensitivity, and in full accordance with the law.

Contrary to what was written in the June 10 article, patient-specific treatment information is not shared with the UI Foundation. The UI respects and honors patients' wishes to opt out of receiving fundraising appeals. All patients at UI Health Care receive the same level of high-quality care with no regard given to ability or inclination to make a gift, or to any other factor.

Indigents, the state's prisoners, and those with some means are given the very same outstanding care. This outstanding care has come to be known as “The Iowa Experience.” Patients from around the country and the world come to Iowa City for their medical needs.

In the 12 years I have served on the IVR, it has served patients from all 50 states and 30 countries. We've heard from so many patients about the special care they were given. The question so frequently asked by them, not of them, is: “How can I say thank you … and help others?” The answer is the grateful patient initiative of the UI Foundation.

Having a well-defined and well-managed patient-based fundraising program is essential for the UI to continue to reach new donors, like me, who want to support the UI in its important mission of curing devastating diseases, or supporting faculty development and training, or funding new facilities, like our Children's Hospital. Nearly all major academic medical centers, indeed nearly all hospitals in Iowa and across the nation, use patient-based fundraising. It is necessary and desirable because it improves peoples' lives, health, and well-being.

One of the main causes in my life is to do all I can to help cure blinding eye diseases. One of the ways I can do this is through my financial support. And I do this because I am grateful, because I see incredible opportunities that must be seized, and because I wish to help others as I have been helped. That is what grateful patient fundraising is all about. And the University of Iowa is exemplary in this important, life-changing way.

Misleading and just plain wrong articles written about grateful patient fundraising at the UI serves no purpose for society. It is both necessary and wonderful having a channel available for those who want to say “thank you” and a program that allows those of us who want to help to do so.

The grateful patient initiative at Iowa is not a glass half-full. It is a glass full to overflowing in value to all who simply want a way to say thanks and to help others.

Gary Seamans, an Iowa City native who resides in Galena, Ill., is a University of Iowa engineering graduate who retired in 1997 as chair and CEO of Westell Technologies Inc. He is currently chair and CEO of IDx, a medical device and software company. A UI building, Seamans Center for the Engineering Arts and Sciences, bears his name. He has served for 16 years on the University of Iowa Foundation board of directors, the last three years as chair of the board's Development Committee. Comments: gseam@hotmail.com