By the time UCI Health CEO Chad Lefteris made it to the dedication ceremony at Los Alamitos, he and his team had already cut the ribbons on three new hospitals in southern California that are now part of UCI Health.
Los Al Medical would be his fourth ribbon cutting this week. To Lefteris, this is the start of something new, yet in a way, it is truly the celebration of a concept they have honed at UC Irvine that is now ready for prime time.
“This is so exciting,” said Lefteris in an exclusive interview with ENE. “The effort it takes to get to this point is tremendous,” he said.
UCI Health is the clinical enterprise of the University of California, Irvine, and the only academic health system based in Orange County.
Until now, UCI Health was based around its main campus, UCI Medical Center, a 459-bed, acute care hospital in Orange.
As an academic health system, Lefteris said the idea is to filter academic excellence, cutting-edge research, and dedicated public service throughout the UCI Health system so that it becomes an ever-evolving learning medical institution.
“We are training the next generation,” said Lefteris. “And we do that across all of our sites,” he said. “And some of that already happens in each of these four sites today. We’ll figure out how best to expand that.”
Moreover, while Tenet Healthcare is the previous owner for a for-profit public company, UCI Health is a nonprofit institution. He said there was no state funding involved in the four-hospital acquisition, saying UCI Health was able to secure bonds to secure the billion-dollar purchase.
“There is no state funding utilized,” said Lefteris, “this is a self-sustaining operation.”
“We believe that when you focus on quality, experience, and access, that the dollars will follow and take care of themselves,” said Lefteris. “So our focus is on improving access to care,” he noted.
He said the various trauma centers developed by UCI Health in a variety of medical disciplines were already over capacity by 5,000 patients last year alone. There was simply insufficient facility space to treat them, he said.
“It started, oh, more than a year and a half, maybe two years ago, when we started to realize that our main Orange Medical Center campus was completely a what I call terminal velocity, completely full every day, seven days a week,” the UCI Health CEO said.
“And we’re turning away patients that were calling us and needing to be transferred for a higher level of care, which is what we are made for correct. We have the expertise to provide the most amazing care but we said no,” he said seriously.
“We said no close to 5000 times last year alone. That’s five thousand patients you turn away,” said Lefteris, “just because we are full, we can’t accept that patient. That’s a problem. That’s a big problem because we have the expertise,” he said.
Emergency room patients are never turned away, he clarified but said patients who clearly needed “higher levels of care” had to be turned away for lack of facilities.
To provide greater access to care, Lefteris said UCI Health had two choices, build new facilities, or find hospitals to acquire.
“Then we start figuring out that in the state of California, you can do two things…you could build new or you could look to partner requirements. And we’re already building new in Irvine. That’s one example. We know how much that cost. It is very expensive. So you can’t grow in just new construction, so we decided let’s do both.”
“That’s really how it came about,” said Lefteris, providing the origin story of the four-hospital acquisition.
Tenet Healthcare, from which the hospitals were acquired, is a for-profit, public company, while UCI Health operates as a nonprofit institution.
Apparently, Tenet needed to make bond payments of its own and Lefteris said when UCI Health looked at the location of the four hospitals, Los Alamitos Medical Center, Lakewood Regional Medical Center, Placentia-Linda Hospital and Fountain Valley Regional Medical Center, the light bulb went off.
“And then when we looked at these facilities, if you look across the map, where they sit and where it where we sit historically, it’s like a puzzle piece that comes together perfectly,” said Lefteris.
“Where they have access where we have access together and it completes a whole network. That’s the idea,” he noted.
Lefteris said the transition is already underway but obviously, won’t happen overnight.
“I meant what I said today, about you know, asking for everyone’s patience or grace as we would say, because it doesn’t happen overnight,” the CEO said.
“In fact, we can make a ton of changes overnight, but they wouldn’t be sustaining changes, right? So we often say that the University of California and UCI Health, that we are well known as a forever organization.
So we take the long view, we don’t have quarterly shareholders so we’re taking the long view with decision making and change because it’s hard. But when you’re doing it for us sustainability mindset, long term mindset, it’ll be more meaningful and better in the end,” said Lefteris.
“For example, I think that some changes can be in the shorter term. Others are much more open. In some cases, it will take years before we change, like changing the electronic medical record, that’s a big one that several physicians just asked me, right. It’s a big one, and it’s a welcome change. But that’s not something that just happens overnight.”
“So maybe in the first year or more, we’ll look to do that across the sites. And then you just start to think about all the other changes. We have a long list as you might expect,” said Lefteris.
It was a welcome change indeed, said Los Alamitos Medical Center CEO Kent Clayton, whom ENE also interviewed after the ceremony.
“Healthcare is extremely challenging right now, very difficult to navigate, so the new access to care and the high level of care provided by the UCI Health system is something to be very excited about and to be proud of real soon,” said Clayton.
“They’re going to learn from us and we’re going to learn from them,” said Clayton, noting that UCI Health’s “high level of clinical research” will bring a new level of care to the facility.
“I think this is going to be just something to be open-eyed and excited about and let’s go as fast as we can to take care of this community.”
