photo by: LMH Health

LMH Health, 325 Maine St., is pictured in May 2021.

Updated at noon Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2023

The LMH Health board of trustees approved a strategic clinical relationship with the University of Kansas Health System Wednesday morning, and hospital leaders say it will pave the way for clinical partnerships that increase patients’ access to specialty care in Douglas County.

At the same time, LMH Health CEO Russ Johnson stressed that the agreement also ensures LMH Health will retain its independence. The hospital hasn’t been sold, Johnson said in a news release about the agreement, and is not for sale. Instead, he said the arrangement ensures that LMH Health can remain a nonprofit, independent community hospital “for years to come.”

Johnson acknowledged during Wednesday’s meeting, though, that a looming sale is a fair concern from folks on the outside looking in, especially considering the recent announcement that nearby Olathe Health is joining the KU Health System.

“Would the University of Kansas Health System like to be having a conversation with us similar to their conversation with Olathe Health? I’m sure they would,” Johnson said during Wednesday’s board meeting. “I think it would be naive to pretend that wasn’t the case, and I think we’d be naive to think that wasn’t maybe in the back of their minds as a possible progression. But the way we have developed our relationship is there’s no de facto mechanism for that to happen. That’s not part of the ending place for us or for them.”

Johnson spoke with the Journal-World about that topic in more detail Tuesday morning. He stressed then, too, that the formalized relationship with the KU health system doesn’t compromise LMH Health’s independence.

Olathe Health’s situation serves as a window into what’s happening in the hospital industry as a whole right now, Johnson added. During his career, he’s seen a change from “virtually all” of the nation’s hospitals being independent to now about 70% being aligned in a hospital system, and the recent shift for Olathe came as a number of those system facilities came closer to their community.

American Hospital Association statistics from 2022 show those numbers to be largely true; the AHA says 3,483 of the country’s 5,139 community hospitals were part of a system last year, or about 68%.

“I don’t want to speak for the decision-making around Olathe, but here’s my observation from the outside,” Johnson told the Journal-World Tuesday. “We are in a very different competitive profile here in Lawrence. We are very fortunate that the city and the community has elected to really support one hospital. And I think what happened, partially, with Olathe is they’re now surrounded. They’ve got HCA in their backyard; they’ve got Saint Luke’s in their backyard.”

Johnson said he expected that a lot of folks would speculate that this move was the “beginning of the end” for LMH Health. But there’s no bait-and-switch in play here, he asserted again, and no predefined steps in that direction laid out in the agreement approved Wednesday.

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LMH Health physicians and administrators have been exploring how a strategic clinical relationship might strengthen local health care services since 2019, and in 2021 began discussing the move with the KU Health System specifically.

Though Wednesday’s board vote officially approved the agreement for the two entities to explore more collaborative endeavors, some of that work has already been underway. For example, the KU Health System has been providing maternal-fetal specialists to the LMH Health Women’s Center at its west campus since late 2021. And last October, an agreement brought a KU Health System team for vascular surgery — which treats a range of heart and blood-flow issues — to LMH’s main campus.

Ninety-two of those vascular surgeries have been performed at LMH Health since October, and that’s another thing Johnson pointed to Tuesday as an example of how the partnership doesn’t pry any independence away from LMH Health. Those were procedures that previously would’ve gone out of the community to be performed but now are directly benefiting the local hospital.

“From a very practical standpoint, that’s an awful lot of reimbursement that leaves our community, for which we have the infrastructure and the overhead and the technology to provide that care, but it’s being decentralized,” Johnson said Tuesday. “I think this is unequivocally not a loss of independence, of governance, of management or control. Our board has been really steadfast about that, and our medical staff has been really firm about that.”

Lawrence and Douglas County are large enough to be able to support primary medicine and some specialties like urology and spine surgery, Johnson told the Journal-World, but medicine is always advancing, and LMH Health just doesn’t have the scale or population to provide a lot of services by itself. The agreement with the KU Health System aims to mitigate those gaps to prevent folks from having to travel to Topeka or Kansas City for certain types of care.

The news release announcing the agreement also notes that a third collaboration is in the works: a partnership called Kansas Sports Medicine, which brings together physicians, clinicians and trainers from LMH Health OrthoKansas and the KU Health System to provide expanded sports medicine care.

But it’s not just the care itself that will be able to take place locally, Johnson said Tuesday. The collaboration also means that postoperative follow-up visits can take place at LMH Health, and patients will have a higher level of care coordination on the whole than they might otherwise. It’ll be more integrated, he said, rather than an abrupt handoff to a doctor with another nearby health system.

Johnson also cited some less fleshed-out ideas that could be possible future collaborations, like interventional cardiology — which specifically deals with catheter-based treatment of structural heart diseases — or cancer care. Johnson said especially in regard to cancer treatment — with the KU Health System being a “leader in the country” and LMH Health boasting an excellent cancer program of its own — it could help ensure that patients who navigate the two hospital systems aren’t lost in the shuffle.

But ultimately, Johnson said future collaborations with the KU Health System were meant to be “clinician-driven” under the new agreement. What that means, he said, is that physicians will be able to help guide those moves based on what’s most helpful to the patients they work with.

“… This is kind of a framework to allow that,” Johnson said. “And one of the things we’re being really clear about is this is not an effort to force physicians to make clinical decisions that they don’t think are in the best interests of their patients.”