PORT ANGELES — Olympic Medical Center approved eight-month personal service contracts Wednesday with nine Virginia Mason primary care physicians.
The agreements totaled $660,867 — salaries for seven full-time doctors that the nine practitioners will divide amongst themselves.
Hospital commissioners also authorized administrators to buy the Klahhane Women’s Clinic, 923 Georgiana St., from Seattle-based Virginia Mason for $775,000, and to lease the main clinic building at 433 E. Eighth St. for $16,000 a month.
The real estate deal could close as early as Friday. The lease will run eight months with an option for 2007. Either side may cancel it with 90 days’ notice.
Virginia Mason Medical Center of Seattle will abandon the Port Angeles operation April 30, claiming it lost $10 million at the satellite clinic over the past 10 years.
$4.3 million in revenue
Olympic Medical Center will collect almost $4.3 million in gross revenue from the same practice between May 1 and the end of this year, according to estimates by Finance Director John Nutter.
Net revenue, however, will total less than $2.2 million, and operating expenses will add up to more than $2.5 million — an operating loss of more than $366,000.
Nutter told members of the Peninsula Medical Cooperative, an ad hoc group of Virginia Mason patients who formed to have a voice in recent negotiations, that he hopes the operation will be in the black beginning in 2007.
“This is going to get run as a business unit so that it’s self-sustaining,” he said.
