PORT ANGELES — Olympic Medical Center faces a chronic shortage of primary care physicians, the family doctors who form the basis of the health care system.
OMC’s solution seems counterintuitive: Aid and abet its competitors. Some examples:
■ The medical center has helped the Jamestown S’Klallam Family Health Clinic — which already shares its Sequim Medical Campus — to recruit family practitioners.
■ It lent critical support to the former Family Medicine of Port Angeles’ efforts to become the North Olympic Health care Network, a federally qualified clinic.
The backing was essential for the clinic to receive the federal designation, which makes it eligible for enhanced Medicare payments and a residency program.
Such cooperation isn’t the rule in other locations where hospitals and federal health centers compete, sometimes bitterly, said Eric Lewis, OMC’s chief executive officer.
“In most communities, it’s just a slugfest,” he said. “We don’t want to go in that direction.”
■ OMC will support Volunteers in Medicine of the Olympics’ free clinic, 819 Georgiana St., Port Angeles, with $158,550 in services and medications, and the Dungeness Valley Health & Wellness Center, 77 N. Fifth Ave., Sequim, with $129,150, mostly in X-ray and laboratory services, in 2016.
The collaboration also benefits OMC, Lewis said.
The free clinics relieve pressure on the hospital’s emergency room, he said, while offering continuing care to patients that the emergency room’s one-time treatment protocol cannot provide.
■ OMC partners with Swedish Medical Center of Seattle, which helps reverse the flow of patients across Puget Sound by providing big-city specialists in sleep medicine, neurology, and cardiology who practice in Port Angeles and Sequim, Lewis said.
Others are available via telemedicine — real-time personal consultations over the Internet.
The partnership increases local employment, Lewis said, by letting patients access care locally.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
