Cedar Rapids hospitals seek dialogue with UI Hospitals and Clinics

Mercy Medical Center and St. Luke's Hospital administrators want to talk with their counterparts at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics about avoiding costly duplication of health care facilities.

Ted Townsend, president of St. Luke's, and Tim Charles, president of Mercy, told 120 people attending a meeting Thursday at the Cedar Rapids Marriott that the current path of constantly investing in new facilities drives up health care costs and is not sustainable.

“Somewhere along the line, we need to have a conversation with the university and say ‘We need to have a more rational process,'” Charles said. “Unfortunately, we don't have a forum for those kinds of conversations.

“The university is beginning to develop services that migrate toward those traditionally found in communities like ours. They have some major initiatives under way that are threatening to the very core of the fabric of the health care delivery system here locally.”

Townsend said the medical community statewide needs to engage in the same kind of dialogue as he and Charles are seeking in the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City Corridor.

“None of our communities are islands when it comes to health care. We're all interconnected,” Townsend said. “I would vastly prefer that we solve it here within the state of Iowa than look to the federal government to define our future.”

University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics officials, responding to the call for a dialogue on health care facilities planning, issued a statement through spokesman Tom Moore.

“University of Iowa health care leaders would continue to welcome any opportunity to discuss collaborative measures that would help control the costs of health care for Iowans.”

Charles, Townsend and John Helbling, a Cedar Rapids consultant hired by the hospitals and Physicians' Clinic of Iowa, outlined a proposed medical district at the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce “Breakfast of Champions.”

Helbling said talks will begin next week with more than 200 property owners in the area where a self-supported municipal improvement district would be created. He said proposed improvements will need to be identified and an appropriate amount of tax to support them calculated before petitions can be circulated to create the district.

Helbling said a current timeline envisions seeking Cedar Rapids Planning and Zoning Commission and Cedar Rapids City Council approval in late summer. The district likely would become effective in early October, about the time Physicians' Clinic of Iowa expects to start construction of a $40 million “medical mall” in the area.