Visionaries at Fairview Health Services saw a chance to support academic medicine while adding high-end services, such as transplants and leading-edge cancer care, to Fairview’s repertoire and providing new opportunities for its Riverside medical center, located just across the Mississippi from the University. In January 1997, University Hospital and Fairview merged, bringing together the strengths of each to create what they hoped would be a new and powerful paradigm for providing exceptional teaching, research, and clinical care.
Anne Taylor, M.D., with a patient
At first the road was rocky. The merger brought together very different cultures—each used to doing things in a certain way. Employees worried about jobs. Physicians on both campuses tried to figure out how they fit into the new reality.
"After high-fives and champagne corks, within six or eight months each side was saying, 'Who are these guys? These guys are crazy—we can't get along with them,'" recalls David R. Page, Fairview president and chief executive officer.
Gradually, however, participants began to acknowledge and appreciate their differences. What were once seen as obstacles were reframed as opportunities. Today, the medical center is financially healthy, providing innovative care to patients from the Upper Midwest and beyond—and looking forward to future growth.
"We are standing on the verge of even more opportunities than we have had in the last five years, certainly more than in the last ten," says Roby Thompson Jr., M.D., chief executive officer for University of Minnesota Physicians.
A sturdy financial foundation
What benefits did the merger bring? Top on the list for the University: "We're still here," says Frank Cerra, M.D., the University's senior vice president for health sciences.
David Rothenberger, M.D., and fourth-year medical student Matthew Miller
"When we embarked on this, the future of University Hospital was in great jeopardy, both financially and competitively," Cerra says. "We were at risk of losing our primary teaching hospital—the hospital at which we performed most of our clinical research, and the place known for high-end, technologically oriented care you can't get in most places."
Before the merger, the University's hospital was projected to lose $50–$55 million per year by 2000. Today, says James Fox, Fairview senior vice president and chief financial officer, it's on a trajectory to produce $30 million in net income for the year.
Premier patient care
That solid fiscal foundation is not just good business. It also allows the medical enter to provide premier care to patients. Since the merger, Fairview has invested some $250 million in facilities and equipment, from creating a kid-friendly imaging and sedation center in the children's hospital to adding a sophisticated da Vinci® robotic surgical system for performing minimally invasive surgeries.
It truly is regarded as one of the big successes in bringing academic and community-based capabilities together.- James Fox, Fairview senior vice president and CFO
Steven Johnson, a retired Minnesota National Guard recruiter from Olivia, Minnesota, has been driving to the University five days a week to receive radiation treatment for prostate cancer. His oncologist, Chinsoo Cho, M.D., says the hospital's TomoTherapy HI-ART System—the first in Minnesota—provides a distinct advantage over conventional therapies for treating Johnson's condition. The $2.6 million device combines CT scanning and radiation therapy to improve the accuracy and efficiency of treatment.
And thanks to the merger, medical innovations like TomoTherapy are reaching more patients faster. With research an important part of its mission, the University has always been a valuable source of new knowledge in health care, and its hospital historically has transformed new knowledge into better patient care.
Minimally invasive surgery is performed using the da Vinci® robotic surgical system.
The world's first successful open-heart surgery was performed here. So were the first successful pancreas transplant and the first successful bone marrow transplant—to name just a few of the University's medical firsts.
By strengthening the Medical School, the merger has allowed this long tradition of innovation to continue. In 1997, the hospital became the first in the world to successfully transplant all intra-abdominal organs from both living and deceased donors. In 2003, the establishment of the Center for Minimally Invasive Surgery, the first in the region, put the medical center at the forefront of teaching, research, and clinical care in this important and fast-growing field. Medical research currently under way at the University is aimed at improving knowledge and patient care in such diverse areas as memory loss, rheumatoid arthritis, compulsive gambling, and lung disease.
Linking the University directly to Fairview's network of seven hospitals and dozens of clinics means more patients have access to the region's top adult and pediatric specialists. And it has given University of Minnesota Physicians' more than 650 doctors—most of them Medical School faculty—a more prominent place in Minnesota's health-care picture.
"Increasingly, health plans are choosing to include our medical system in their contracts because we offer patients options that no one else can offer," Thompson says. "Whether it's Blue Cross and Blue Shield or HealthPartners or Medica, they want us in their portfolios."