Long Beach Hospitals Take Steps Toward Merger

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Long Beach Hospitals Take Steps Toward Merger
Vernon medical waste plant.

Last month’s departure of Ray Jankowski as chief executive of Community Hospital of Long Beach accelerated what may be the inevitable consolidation in the South Bay city’s hospital community.

Following the departure, Community Hospital’s board agreed to have the owner of Long Beach Memorial Medical Center take over management of Community while ongoing merger negotiations proceed.

“We are both very similar – both very mission-driven and have collaborated in the past – so philosophically and culturally this was a natural time to move forward,” said Diana Hendel, chief executive of Memorial, the city’s largest hospital.

Memorial and adjacent Miller Children’s Hospital are both owned by MemorialCare Health System, a Fountain Valley nonprofit that operates five hospitals and several clinics and imaging centers in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Hendel is expected to add the chief executive duties at Community as soon as July under the management agreement. Community’s other top managers, including longtime Chief Operating Officer Diane DeWalsche, will remain. (Jankowski left for a position at CalOptima, which administers MediCal benefits for Orange County.)

What has driven the merger? National healthcare reform has given a financial advantage to hospitals with larger economies of scale in purchasing and administration, Hendel said. But she stressed the merger discussions have been focused on how the two hospitals complement each other.

Community would provide MemorialCare a stronger presence on the east side of Long Beach, and maintain a strong nonprofit healthcare presence in the county’s second largest city. Community Hospital has struggled financially over the years. Previous owner Catholic Healthcare West, a large Catholic system based in San Francisco, closed Community in 2000, but a group of doctors and residents worked together to reopen the hospital as an independent institution a year later. Catholic Healthcare still owns the city’s St. Mary’s Medical Center.

If the merger takes place, MemorialCare is expected to keep Community as independent as possible. Hendel notes that while her system’s hospitals share many administrative services, each maintains their own unique character in their communities.

“Not all hospitals have to consolidate, but for those institutions where it makes sense, it can make each institution stronger, especially as the health care industry evolves,” she said.

‘Greening’ Medical Waste

Waste Management Inc. is banking that its new state-of-the-art “green” medical waste plant in Vernon will give it an edge in gaining more business from local health care facilities.

The Los Angeles regional office of the Houston waste and environmental services giant is emphasizing the environmentally friendly features of the plant, which expects to be certified this fall as the world’s first green medical waste processing facility.

Medical waste, which can range from used bandages to empty syringes, has to be handled separately from regular waste to minimize contamination and transfer of communicable diseases. Among those procedures is sterilization before the material is either sent off for recycling or disposal in a regular landfill.

“Health care facilities that are interested in doing business with green facilities will be interested in what we have done in Vernon,” said Tim Tucker, senior district manager for WM Healthcare Solutions.

Waste Management had been sending its Los Angeles-area medical waste to a leased processing facility in Phoenix that it recently acquired. The addition of the Vernon facility and a third plant in Reno, Nev. will enable the company to better compete with Stericycle Inc., a Lake Forest, Ill., public company that specializes in medical waste.

The Vernon plant, which cost more than $8 million to build on contaminated industrial property that had to be cleaned up, features recycled construction materials and operations that are energy efficient; that runs the gamut from washing processes that use minimal water to sterilizing autoclaves that conserve and reuse generated heat.

An executive at Good Samaritan Hospital said the environmentally friendly plant was one reason the downtown Los Angeles hospital is doing business with VM Healthcare.

“One of the things we’re looking for in implementing our environmental impact plan is partnering with companies that also are committed to environment improvement,” said Jeremy Stacy, director of environmental services at the hospital.

Blog Buy

Canon Communications LLC, a Los Angeles-based publisher and trade-show operator catering to the pharmaceutical industry, has acquired Pharmalot, a well-respected pharmaceutical industry news blog.

Pharmalot founder Ed Silverman joins the firm as part of the deal, terms of which were not disclosed. Silverman, a former Newark Star Ledger reporter, is based in New Jersey. Pharmalot becomes part of Canon’s Pharmaceutical Media Group.

Staff reporter Deborah Crowe can be reached at [email protected] or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 232.

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