Surgeons join Sacred Heart

Sacred Heart Medical Center is acquiring a heart-surgery practice in a deal both parties say is designed to stabilize cardiac care in the region.

The surgeons at Northwest Heart and Lung Surgery Associates perform nearly 1,100 procedures at Sacred Heart each year and draw patients from throughout the area. They perform 400 surgeries at other hospitals.

Despite the buyout that will result in the physicians becoming Sacred Heart employees, surgeons will continue to provide medical services to other hospitals, such as Deaconess and Kootenai medical centers.

Sacred Heart President Mike Wilson and Northwest Heart and Lung President Dr. William Coleman would not divulge financial terms of the buyout. All 46 of the practice’s employees will move to Sacred Heart.

Coleman said he approached Sacred Heart nine months ago after two prominent medical organizations attempted to recruit one of Northwest Heart and Lung’s top surgeons, Dr. Leland Siwek.

The efforts by Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center and the Cleveland Clinic served as a wake-up call for the practice, Coleman said, triggering worries that the loss of Siwek would spur the exit of other surgeons.

Siwek is the surgeon behind Sacred Heart’s touted robotic heart surgery program. While neither side would say how the Sacred Heart deal might prevent doctors being recruited away in the future, they acknowledged that the departure of Siwek and other surgeons would have hurt the practice at a time when expert cardiovascular surgeons are in short supply nationwide. It also would cut into Sacred Heart’s heart care, Wilson said. The hospital bills itself among the nation’s leaders for heart surgeries and care. It’s a distinction they credit, in part, to Northwest Heart and Lung.

Wilson said the purchase will not limit patient choice and is not a reaction to the proposed sale of Deaconess this year to Community Health Systems Inc., the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain.

“In fact, it preserves what we have and ensures our ability to grow our cardiac program” he said.

Northwest Heart and Lung’s name will be maintained. The practice was started in 1952 by Dr. Ralph Berg Jr.

It has more surgeons now than ever and remains profitable, Coleman said, describing the practice’s financial condition as good, while lamenting reimbursement rates that can be 50 percent less than what the practice bills.

There are several other large cardiology clinics in Spokane, and Wilson said Sacred Heart remains committed to working with all of them.

The shortage of cardiac surgeons and financial pressures have made affiliations with major hospitals more common.

Sacred Heart remains home to the Providence Medical Research Center, which replaced the Heart Institute of Spokane.