PORT ANGELES — Sleep medicine is coming back to Clallam County.
Olympic Medical Center reached an agreement with Swedish Medical Center earlier this month that will bring a sleep specialist from the Seattle area to Sequim.
The sleep physician will provide professional services for OMC and its accredited sleep center. OMC will provide the billing services and clinic space.
“This is something we’ve been working on in good faith with Swedish since November of 2011,” said Dr. Scott Kennedy, OMC’s chief medical officer, Feb. 1.
Obtain support
“The purpose of the contract is to, No. 1, obtain recruitment support from Swedish, both the sleep medicine system there but also the Swedish recruitment team.
“It’s for placement of a Swedish-employed sleep physician in the Olympic Medical Center clinic system with Olympic Medical Physicians,” Kennedy said.
“The contract contains a provision for negotiation in good faith to keep the base salary for the expense of having this physician at OMC to about the 25th percentile.”
The 25th percentile works out to about $240,000 per year.
OMC commissioners voted 6-0 to approve the sleep medicine contract, which Kennedy first introduced Jan. 4.
OMC’s vision is to work closely with Swedish and its sleep program to achieve the following goals:
■ Recruit a sleep physician to bring OMC’s program back up.
“We lost our sleep physician last summer and had to temporarily suspend operations at our sleep program,” Kennedy said.
■ Provide local sleep medical services and lab studies.
■ Provide access to OMC’s broad payer mix.
“We are an accredited sleep program now, and we worked hard to maintain that accreditation during that temporary period,” Kennedy said.
Good position
“So we’re in a good position to restart. We’ve kept things ready.”
Eventually, OMC hopes to combine its sleep clinic and sleep studies facility into one location.
“This is something we have space for,” Kennedy said.
“We have unused clinic space that can be remodeled.
“We’ve got some preliminary plans that show this is a possibility.”
OMC approved a 20-year affiliation agreement with Swedish in October. Jefferson Healthcare and Forks Community Hospital followed suit with similar agreements of their own.
Kennedy said sleep medicine is an “important service” for the community.
“It’s important for the patients who have serious obstructive sleep apnea and other types of sleep problems to not have to go too far out of the community with these conditions,” he said.
“We also think it’s an important program to bring back to life as we position ourselves for the possibility of health care payment reform in the future, possibly in the form of accountable care organizations.
“And we look forward to co-marketing, as appropriate, with the Swedish program.
“Our goal is to really develop the highest-quality semi-rural sleep facility in the state.”
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-417-3537 or at rob.ollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
