SITKA, ALASKA
As we start to walk through the hallways of Sitka Community Hospital, CEO Hugh Hallgren tells me a group of kindergarteners are also in the building, on a school tour.
“But I’ve already sent an e-mail out explaining that you’re coming,” Hallgren says, “and that they can tell the difference between you and the kindergarteners because you’re taller and you’ll probably have more technical questions.”
Well, I’m taller, anyway.
One of our first stops is the hospital’s CT scanner. It looks like a giant donut with a big tray coming out of it. The machine takes pictures of the tissue inside your body. The hospital has had a CT scanner for years, but the machine this one replaced was far less sophisticated. Imagine putting a loaf of bread into the scanner. With the last machine, doctors could only see the loaf slice by slice.
“Instead of that slice of bread, where we took one slice out, now put a slinky there, and we’re collecting all the data in the whole slinky,” says Ronda Anderson, manager of the radiology department.
In other words, they can look inside the whole loaf all at once. That’s Ronda Anderson, by the way, the manager the radiology department here. She takes me behind a pane of glass, where we look at two images – one taken the old way – the slices of bread – and the other taken using the new machine – the slinky model. The difference is startling. The old images are black-and-white blobs, and make little sense to the untrained eye. But the new images look like those 3-D plastic models they have in school science labs.
“This is colon, right here, these are the kidneys, this is your sternum, ribs, scapula pelvis. And then we can turn this on an axis and rotate it so you can see each angle there,” Anderson says.
The image on the screen is so clear that when the kindergartners come in and look, they can recognize the parts they see on the screen.
The newer technology in this hospital, from the CT scanners to medical health record computers to new lab equipment that turns out test results faster and more precisely – those are all great to look at. But Hallgren says they’re also crucial to the operation of the hospital, especially in recruiting physicians.
“Physicians are very interested in state of the art equipment, so they can provide state-of-the-art care to their patients,” Hallgren says.
Brock Slabach, senior vice president at the Kansas City-based National Rural Health Association, agrees. He says medical schools use a lot of technology in training doctors, and any more, it’s just a given that it will exist in the places they go on to practice medicine.
“Not just physicians, keep in mind,” he said. “We’re talking about pharmacists and physical therapists, and nurse practitioners and physician assistants. They’re all being trained in these environments, so it goes well beyond the position.”
Back in the hospital, Dr. James Cabeen is sitting at a table in the cafeteria. Cabeen is one of the hospital’s newest recruits, but he’s not a recent medical school grad. He practiced for a time in Michigan and then in Barrow before coming to Sitka. It was a friend who told him about the job and encouraged him to work here. But did any of the technology at Sitka Community Hospital play a role in Cabeen’s decision take the job?
“I’ve got to tell you the truth, it didn’t in particular,” he said, “because my background in medicine is in the military. Talk about sparse supplies and abilities to do things out in the dirt.”
Cabeen says some doctors feel there’s too much technology, and others might rely too much on it.
“Most of us fall somewhere in between,” Cabeen said. “I’m really happy to work in any setting, be it in the middle of the wilderness with nothing more than what I can carry on my back, or at an ICU at a tertiary care center, or anything in between.”
In a way, Hallgren, the CEO, agrees with that. The technology helps attract people to practice medicine here, but he says it’s ultimately those people who make the difference in both the hospital’s quality of care and its ability to sustain itself.
“We’re just trying to break even or above, and so far we’re not quite breaking even this year,” he said. “But as I mentioned to you earlier, we haven’t gotten into the summer rush hour, so we have high hopes that things will be above break-even here this year, not by much, but above.”
And while rural hospitals like this one are considered safety nets, not money makers, Hallgren says everyone appreciates it when the hospital can support itself.
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