Dear Community,
I have been a board-certified general surgeon for over 20 years and moved to Hopkinsville in 2014. I’d like to offer my perspective on the potential partnership between Jennie Stuart Hospital and Deaconess. While I may be seen as an outsider since I’m not originally from Hopkinsville, I speak as someone with “boots on the ground.”
My first position after completing my surgery residency training was at Middletown Regional Hospital in Middletown, Ohio, where I began in 2002. Like Jennie Stuart, it was a community hospital with a long proud history. Shortly after I arrived, the hospital joined Premier Health in Dayton, Ohio. This partnership provided much-needed financial support, a state-of-the-art electronic medical record system (Epic EMR), and a new facility. The hospital was renamed Atrium Medical Center, and not only were no jobs lost, but new ones were created. New service lines were established and today that hospital continues to thrive. But most importantly, the community benefited tremendously.
An unfortunate reality of healthcare in America is the rising cost of delivering care, driven by a private, for-profit health insurance system. While not ideal, it’s our current system. Furthermore, advancements in medical science are constantly producing newer and more expensive treatments. Like the surgical robots and expensive drugs such as Ozempic for weight loss. The increasing complexity of our healthcare delivery system also requires multimillion dollar electronic medical record systems like Epic unlike the paper charts that we used to use in the old days. These costs make it increasingly difficult for small, independent hospitals to stay competitive and eventually even stay open. This has already impacted many private practices over the past two decades.
The natural progression for many hospitals nationwide is to join larger healthcare systems with more resources.
I am very familiar with importance of providing specialized care here locally. When I arrived in Hopkinsville in 2014, our community’s dialysis patients had to travel out of town for dialysis access care, and some even needed assistance with transportation or gas vouchers to afford the trip. Not everyone has easy means to travel out of town for health care. With Jennie Stuart Hospital’s support, I started a dialysis access service line, allowing patients to get these essential procedures here locally.
As a surgeon in Hopkinsville, I see every day the gaps in care that we can’t fill on our own. For instance, local control alone cannot prevent a grandfather from traveling to Madisonville or Nashville for a cardiac catheterization after a heart attack. Nor can it allow for routine procedures like a CT-guided drainage of an abscess by an interventional radiologist after abdominal surgery or an ERCP [endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography] by a gastroenterologist for the removal of gallstones from the common bile duct following gallbladder removal. These services, and many more, are areas where partnership with a larger healthcare system could bring significant improvements to our community.
These examples reflect just a portion of what we could gain by becoming part of a larger healthcare network.
Personally, I’ve always been drawn to working at small community hospitals like Jennie Stuart that provides healthcare to underserved communities, and I wish they could still operate as they did in the past. However, the medical industry is evolving and this is the new reality.
In hope and resolve,
David Kabithe MD, Fellow of the American College of Surgeons
Dr. David Kabithe is a board certified general surgeon as well as dialysis access surgeon. He has been in practice for 20 years. He currently practices at Jennie Stuart Health. He is also an avid runner and marathoner.
