PORT ANGELES — Olympic Medical Center will charge hospital inpatients 5 percent more next year if commissioners adopt a strategic plan and draft budget they previewed this week.
Outpatients and clients of Olympic Medical Physicians clinics would pay 4 percent more for their care under the proposal for 2016-18.
And property owners in the district that embraces central and eastern Clallam County would see a 1 percent hike in their property taxes that will produce an added $40,000 and bring OMC’s yearly tax take to just more than $4 million.
That revenue is earmarked for charity care and to maintain OMC’s standing as the only Level 3 trauma center on the North Olympic Peninsula.
Commissioners held a public hearing in the medical center Wednesday afternoon at which no members of the public spoke.
OMC staff will discuss the budget and adjust details before presenting it to commissioners to accept or reject at their next meeting at 6 p.m. Nov. 18 at the hospital, 939 Caroline St.
Rural residency
With no one else offering comments, the only statements commissioners heard Tuesday came from CEO Eric Lewis and Chief Financial Officer Julie Rukstad.
New programs that Lewis previewed include a residency in rural family medicine in partnership with Swedish Medical Center, Seattle, and with the North Olympic Healthcare Network at Family Medicine of Port Angeles, 240 W. Front St.
The residency program would start at Swedish in July 2017 and expand to Port Angeles a year later. It would offer residencies to two doctors each year and cost $400,000 to $500,000 annually, Lewis said.
$4.5 million
The draft budget also allocates $4.5 million to capital spending on medical equipment, much of it for imaging, anesthesia, surgical and radiation oncology hardware, “to make sure we have better than Seattle,” Lewis said.
He said the committee proposing capital outlays this year had been heavily staffed with surgeons.
“We’re finally getting some things that surgery has really needed,” he said.
Other planned improvements and expansions at OMC’s Port Angeles hospital and its Sequim Medical Campus include:
■ Certification in an internationally standardized quality control system known as ISO 9001 by 2017.
■ Qualification for a Medicare-approved infection-control program by the end of 2017.
■ A pain-management program that would include psychiatry, anesthesia, physical therapy and addiction control by 2017.
■ More than $5.2 million in uncompensated care.
The draft budget also allocates $750,000 for planning and designing expansion of the Sequim Medical Campus, 840 N. Fifth Ave., and $14.2 million for the two-story, 42,587-square-foot medical office building under construction on the block bordered by Race, Caroline, Washington and Georgiana streets.
As part of that project, commissioners Tuesday approved adding $132,000 for on-site management services by architect Rice Fergus Miller of Bremerton. Completion of the building is set for next October, Lewis said.
The cost of on-site architectural management, said Commissioner John Nutter, probably would be recouped in other savings in time and money.
Commissioners also added $70,038 to the cost of the medical office building to remove 900 cubic yards of dirt that proved too soft to support its parking lot and to backfill the site with 1,200 tons of rock.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
