Medical school critical

by Steve Ballard, chancellor, East Carolina University, published in Greenville Daily Reflector, June 14, 2014.

Since the early 1970s, The Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University and Vidant Medical Center (formerly Pitt County Memorial Hospital) have sustained a unique relationship that is essential to eastern North Carolina.

That relationship has supported the health care needs of one-third of the state, helped this university grow to more than 26,000 students and fueled a center of prosperity and jobs that boosts the economy in the East.

Specifically:

• The two institutions have a combined economic impact on North Carolina of more than $2.5 billion each year.
• Brody is a critical resource in producing physicians that serve North Carolina. Historically, a higher percentage of its medical graduates enter primary care than any other academic medical center in North Carolina and a higher percentage of its medical graduates practice primary care long-term. Brody trains a higher percentage of doctors that practice in North Carolina — 53 percent — than any other academic center.
• The relationship between Brody and Vidant is essential for training and licensing of thousands of health care professionals — from nurses to physical therapists to emergency room doctors. ECU’s goal is to have 3,500 students studying in health sciences fields, virtually all of whom will get jobs that pay well.
• The Brody School brings in more than $20 million per year in research funding, most of which comes from out of state and provides jobs for our region. Our research has led to significant innovations that have helped correct stuttering, made heart surgery minimally-invasive, created numerous patents and help seek cures for some cancers and diabetes — diseases whose incidence in eastern N.C. is higher than the national average.
• Together, Brody and Vidant support the only level one trauma center in northeastern North Carolina — bridging a significant gap in coverage between southeastern Virginia and Raleigh.

We believe these impacts are of enormous value to eastern North Carolina and to the entire state. We hope you agree and we would ask you to tell your local representatives to support them.

Specifically, we would ask that the conference committee restore a long-standing method to collect debts owed us, as is allowed to 152 other state agencies. Also we ask that our ability to access essential federal Medicaid funds is restored. Both are critical to the sustainability of Brody and its relationship with Vidant. A proposal to partially restore access to federal Medicaid funds nods to that urgency, but stops short of what is needed.

We think it’s important to recognize our unique situation. Brody does not own a hospital; its relationship with Vidant provides a teaching hospital for our students. We have a patient population which, on average, is statistically poorer and sicker than elsewhere in the state. We are almost the only safety net to hundreds of thousands of people in 29 counties in the region. And despite the repeated false claims by those opposed to restoring the essential funding tools, we don’t compete with hospitals in the Triangle, Triad or Charlotte.

State funds pay only 20 percent of the cost of operating the Brody School. The majority — 72 percent — comes from the faculty clinical practice. But the loss of our longstanding method to collect debts and our ability to fully access essential Medicaid funds has seriously compromised our ability to backfill recent state budget cuts through our faculty practice.

Rep. Brian Brown, R-Pitt County, deserves credit for the work he has done to educate the legislature about these facts and support these valuable resources.

Like all health care entities, Brody currently is responding to shifts in health care and to state budget reductions of 19 percent over the past five years by taking steps that will keep costs down and by reconfiguring how we do business. We are committed both to efficiency and to better service.

Yet those steps alone will not be enough. Restoring our full access to federal Medicaid payments as well as our historic debt collection authority are wise and successful investments in valuable, unique regional resources that return billions of dollars to our state’s economy.

http://www.reflector.com/opinion/other-voices/ballard-medical-school-critical-2507059