In a move to give patients access to additional hospitals and services, Visalia Medical Clinic, a group of 62 physicians and other health care providers, is partnering with Adventist Health Physicians Network, effective May 1, 2023.
“In partnering with Adventist Health, along with their four hospitals and more than 60 medical offices in the Valley, it expands our patients’ access to comprehensive care in Hanford, Tulare and other locations, in addition to Visalia,” said Angela Pap, M.D., VMC Board Chair and President. Adventist Health is also a multi-state health system, which improves our ability to grow our services as needed in the future.
The transition includes the Visalia Medical Clinic and Sleep Lab on West Hillsdale Avenue, its Aesthetic Center on Avenida de los Robles and its Physical Rehabilitation Center on North Akers Street.
Visalia Medical Clinic providers will continue to contract with the same major health plans, so there will be no disruption in care for current patients, Dr. Pap said. Adventist Health is also expanding hospital contracts with health plans to ensure patients have access to hospital, surgical and outpatient services in the Valley.
“We’re thrilled that Visalia Medical Clinic is joining our network of physicians,” said Gurvinder Kaur, M.D., Chief Medical Officer for Adventist Health hospitals in Hanford, Reedley, Selma and Tulare. “These physicians and providers are known for their excellent, compassionate care, and we’re honored to serve with them.”
In addition to expanding access to care for Visalia patients, the partnership with Adventist Health will open options for patients in other communities to see the Visalia providers, said Raul Ayala, M.D., Ambulatory Medical Officer for Adventist Health. “Patients benefit when they have more options and access.”
In addition to the four Central Valley hospitals and other Valley services, Adventist Health also operates hospitals in Bakersfield, Delano and 14 other California cities in addition to Oregon and Hawaii. The Hanford hospital opened in 1965 and moved to a newly built medical center in 2010. The system acquired the Selma hospital in 1998 and began leasing the Reedley hospital in 2011 and the Tulare hospital in 2018. Other expansions have included the addition of two family medicine residencies, dozens of medical offices in five Valley counties, a Breast Care Center, a Digestive Health Center and a partnership with Valley Children’s Healthcare to provide primary and complex care for children.
Visalia Medical Clinic may be reached at 559-738-7500, and more information is available at AdventistHealth.org/VisaliaMedicalClinic.
Visalia Medical Clinic, which was established in 1940, is the largest physician-owned clinic in the South Valley. The clinic includes 62 physicians and providers as well as lab and imaging services, and operates four locations: the Visalia Medical Clinic, Sleep Lab, Aesthetic Center and Physical Rehabilitation Center. The physicians and providers at the Visalia Medical Clinic are part of a proud tradition of providing excellent medical care to this community for over 80 years. Through the years and much growth, the clinic has remained committed to providing quality care to all patients, helping them to live fully and be well.
Adventist Health Central Valley Network, a group of four hospitals serving the Central Valley, is part of Adventist Health, a faith-based, nonprofit, integrated health system serving more than 80 communities on the West Coast and Hawaii with over 400 sites of care. In the Central Valley, Adventist Health operates hospitals in Hanford, Reedley, Selma and Tulare and medical offices in Kings, Kern, Fresno, Madera and Tulare counties. Founded on Adventist heritage and values, Adventist Health provides care in hospitals, clinics, home care agencies, hospice agencies and joint-venture retirement centers in both rural and urban communities. Its compassionate and talented team of 37,000 includes employees, physicians, allied health professionals and volunteers driven in pursuit of one mission: living God’s love by inspiring health, wholeness and hope. Together, they are transforming the health-care experience with an innovative and whole-person focus on physical, mental, spiritual and social healing to support community well-being.
Yay I hope this brings Kaweah delta to their knees 🤣🤣🤣
and why would you want that Jason?…..I would not want to drive to Tulare or Hanford to have my kids or for an emergency!
Clearly you do not care about quality of care 🤭
Is quality of care served by having one institution take over Tulare County?!
Why anyone would want to see less options for an underserved area! Well, they must have some sort of a profit motive. Just the thought is disgusting, this area is already underserved and letting anyone monopolize the health of the area is a terrible idea.
And yes. Kaweah has gobbled up a lot in Visalia. There has to be a check on Kaweah AND there has to be a check on Adventist.
It is a shame we did not get a third party like Dignity Health at Tulare but that ship has sailed into the sunset.
I hope this does NOT bring Kaweah to their knees. The people in Tulare that had to drive to Visalia or Hanford when their hospital was shut down can tell you just how important it is to have care close by.
Well I hope it does, and anyone with any common sense would know bringing them to their knees would force a sale to another entity 😉 possibly to community or sutter or Risant and so forth and so on. So yes bring them to their knees and squeeze out the incompetent leadership 😁
Fingers crossed that Adventist Health will not be making changes at Visalia Medical Center on the who, what, and where in the clinic’s operations. They are just fine the way they are. There is more than enough room and need for both Tulare Adventist and Kaweah when it comes to hospital care. Tulare’s Adventist has quite a ways to go and a lot more work in getting our hospital back up to the quality of care and services that this community once received and counted on a long long time back. In the meantime many Tulareans continue to turn to Kaweah Delta for hospital needs and rightly so and that’s why we need Kaweah to stay healthy and financially solvent. Both hospitals hopefully should remember that bigger isn’t always better when it comes to delivery in healthcare services nor does it make for deliverable steady profits when they are mired down in over-extended corporate greed.
Killer Delta is a joke 🤣🤣🤣 oh Barbara 🤦🏿♂️
Adventist Health. The best marketed and worst medical care in the US. Now Visalia residents have the choice of going to those famous centers of excellence: Hanford, Tulare, Reedley, Selma. LMAO.
Sure seems like Killer Delta is a center of excellence, eh Edge 😂😂😂-moron!
1)Sex offender walks away from Kaweah Health Mental Health Hospital!
2)Investigation: Kaweah Health improperly releases suicidal patient from hospital!
3)Kaweah Health under regulators’ microscope after drug control negligence, deaths
4)Overdose death of Kaweah Health contract employee leads to federal investigation
5)Kaweah Delta Mental Health worker arrested for sexual assault.
6)State: Kaweah Delta failed to report rape allegation within mandated time period.
7)California health officials Issue $52k fine to Kaweah Delta in Visalia
Your comments Jason don’t have anything to do with quality medical care for patients, rather focus on one off situations resulting in the actions of a few individuals. I’d encourage you to educate yourself a bit. You seem to be carrying some sort of bias. Or you’re just a troll…..
Educated myself? Have nothing to do with quality 😳😂 what a idoit 🤦🏿♂️
I feel for you Jason. It must be a tough life to carry so much negative feelings around with so little purpose. Maybe you should try to use your energy for something productive. Kaweah Delta is a public community hospital, not a private system like Adventist. You are welcome to run for the KD board, attend board meetings, and express your feelings and concerns in person. Maybe give it a try and make some real change in the community! If you really care.
Feelings or facts? You have no understanding of quality in relation to healthcare. No one person makes any difference, the ignorance of the board and leadership there is the problem. I never ever let my family go to any of those hospitals, I have them drive to CRMC and get care there. The best thing would be to allow them to fail financially and have another company come in to manage them.
Just curious, but what makes you the expert on the subject? You’ve yet to state any real facts with any real substance…. You speak of ignorance of the board and leadership but have nothing to support it. We as community members need to hold those in elected positions accountable. But just stating misleading comments as fact is not good for anyone. Letting a system fail as you suggest would not be the “best thing” for the thousands they employ or the thousands that would be effected. Again I go back to the grudge you seem to hold.
Great questions, Susan! I’ve been a Registered Nurse for over ten years and have worked in Academic hospitals. I’ve read the reports from CMS regarding all these prior instances and see the neglect and reckless put forth by these administrators. Right before covid hit the hospital was high risk at losing it’s accreditation and took over ten policy revisions before anything was seen as complaint. Now mind you the have a risk management and quality program in place way before this event occurred and look at this outcome. And now you see them adding to the executive team well cutting beside staff. A nurse overworked is not going to provide safe competent care but the board and leaderships ignorance put their interest before those working tirelessly at the bedside. I can go on and on and I care because my family lives there its a shame that this is wgat they get in terms of care.
Are you still working as an RN is this area? And if so, are you employed by a hospital or medical clinic or other?
I work for a hospital, currently transitioning to leadership.
I am sure that Kaweah Health isn’t perfect, but they must be doing something right to be named one of the best 100 hospitals in the country.
https://www.thegoodlifesv.com/story/2023/03/01/news/healthgrades-ranks-kaweah-health-in-top-2-percent/802.html
Even more laughable then all the other comments, you mean the one that acctual top hospitals decided to no longer be a part of? There is the article link but in case you but here a some parts of it that you may find helpful 😂😂😂😂
Lloyd Minor, dean of the Stanford School of Medicine, issued a statement that said, “We believe that the methodology [of U.S. News], as it stands, does not capture the full extent of what makes for an exceptional learning environment.”
Dennis S. Charney, the dean of Mount Sinai, and David Muller, chair of medical education there, issued a statement that said, “The integrity of research is an important factor in our decision. The rankings reduce our scientific innovation, discoveries, entrepreneurship, and clinical impact to one number: our total federal funding. This does not adequately represent the hard work, dedication, creativity, and benefit to humanity of our research enterprise and the many novel diagnostics and therapeutics it has produced.”
Best hospital😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
https://www.highereddive.com/news/stanford-columbia-penn-mount-sinai-medical-schools-withdraw-from-us-ne/641090/
Kaweah was recognized by HealthGrades. You are talking about US News and World Report.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. You clearly have yours, which is perfectly fine. Healthgrades, an independent hospital quality rating agency, has theirs.
EVEN MORE LAUGHABLE 😂
They do no differetiant hospitals that offer complex cases, such as cardiac procedures and in hopes of circumventing these transparency problems, HealthGrades exploited an important loophole. Hospitals perform heart surgery mainly on those that are elderly and insured by Medicare, who reimburse hospitals after they submit codes that reflect all the diagnoses in the patient’s records during the hospital stay. These codes are put into a database called MedPAR and have been used to determine risks and outcomes on patients undergoing heart surgery, at least for those over age 65. The advantage of MedPAR is that Federal law requires regular release of these data to the public, meaning the wall of silence is now broken. The main disadvantage is that these data were not generated with the goal of researching the quality of a surgeon but for the purpose of generating a hospital bill as high as legally allowed.
With a surgeon’s reputation and patient’s safety potentially at stake, data used for surgeon profiling should be at least as rigorous as that demanded of peer-reviewed clinical research. It is not appropriate research technique to define a patient’s underlying surgical risks and outcomes by simply accepting as fact all the diagnoses written in the medical chart. Instead, researchers apply specific and measurable criteria. For instance, a patient suggested in the medical record to have lung disease would have their actual lung function confirmed by objective testing before reaching this conclusion. The fundamental flaw of a database collected for financial reasons (called an administrative database) is there was never any incentive for this necessary rigor. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The hospital has a financial conflict of interest caused by getting reimbursed more by Medicare when patients are considered high surgical risk. Staff that review the medical records to generate codes from a list called ICD-9 aren’t qualified (or incentivized) to second guess the accuracy of a diagnosis documented in a chart by a physician. Their job is simply to generate as many codes as possible. Physicians themselves help coders do their job after receiving training called “clinical documentation improvement” (CDI). It is important and valuable for physicians to write notes in a way that optimizes reimbursement. However, this is a separate topic than quality assurance. In spite its Orwellian title, being trained for this type of “improvement” isn’t going to lead to more rigorous data.
Two recently introduced technologies may help HealthGrades in its mission. Electronic health records have been universally adopted and will provide more uniformity in the coding process used by hospitals (and therefore improve the data). In addition, the current coding system used for billing (ICD-9) is being revamped (ICD-10), in part so the codes themselves provide information detailed enough to clarify the connection between a provider’s performance and the patient’s condition. But the confusion that surrounds the early adoption phase of most innovations often makes things worse before they get better. If you are hopeful that electronic records and ICD-10 are going to help improve the quality of administrative data in the future, then you have to admit that their existing datasets are in need of improvement. Doesn’t it make sense to wait for the effects of these improvements over the next few years rather than go with inadequate ICD-9 codes collected using variable methods from frequently illegible paper records? The answer is clear considering the significant, unintended, and potentially deleterious consequences that can result if ratings based on inaccurate data do not effectively discriminate between CT surgical program’s performance. It’s a problem that reminds us of the computer axiom, “garbage in – garbage out”.
Honestly Jason, I’m impressed. It would appear you clearly know a lot about the ins and outs of the industry. Again I encourage you to do some good with your knowledge and help to improve things, not bring them down. I do find it odd that you are so quick to discredit Kaweah’s service when recently both Stanford and USC have teamed up with Kaweah to help strengthen specialty service lines. Again something I don’t think Kaweah would be able to get those institutions to do, if they were in fact as horrible as you make it sound. You attack because quality isn’t up to your standards, but then you attack because they hired what appears to be a very qualified CMO to help address the issue, improve accountability amongst the medical staff and improve performance.
Susan I want the C suite swept clean, New fresh leadership. Now one from the outside could believe that institutions like Stanford and USC only team up based on quality but this simply isn’t true. They look for areas that have need and ways to divert a patient population that does not serve their bottom line to hospitals such as Kaweah in this case. The CMO maybe well qualified and he himself is not being attacked, the problem for me is with the fact that bedside staff took and are taking a pay cut, no contributions to their retirement accounts and are over worked and understaff. Now I ask you where is your concern and advocacy for them? They do not get all their breaks, they get mistreated and are overworked, their take home pay slashed by 20% and you hear the same of leadership. They make well over 300K and you think that a 20% pay cut for executives is the same compared to bedside staff? and they somehow have money to add another six figure executives? Where are the priorities for safety, quality and community
I guess I can only speak for the few nurses I know there but their pay has not been cut. But I don’t know if that’s the case for all. They are not contract nurses though and from what I understand the contract nurses are definitely making less than they were a year ago. Sounds like staffing is definitely an issue, but not as a result of letting go of good, capable bedside nurses. More as a result of a nation wide shortage that COVID made worse, and understandably. My sister in law quit shortly after the pandemic started. She was close to retiring anyway, but COVID just made things unbearable. I read an article published yesterday speaking to the amount of money Hospitals like Kaweah lose with the high MediCal population they serve, I had no idea. But also I don’t see how one six figure executive would make or break things. The salary doesn’t even equate to a fraction of the overall shortage of nurses needed. You’re also assuming it was a choice of one over the other. Sorry for being hung up on it but I still question the seemingly present distain you have for the current leadership. It doesn’t sound like you’ve ever worked there, attended any board meetings, or even really know who these people are. Why are you so confident they are so incompetent?
Well that’s interesting if you review their board meetings and see how all of the staff got a 20% and no contribution to their retirements in addition to the layoffs you would understand it a bit more, also when staff are getting cuts and over worked you see no problem with hiring a 6 figure executive? Rather interesting! You should try speaking with some of the staff there 😉 I have, also the nursing shortage is year long result of hospital under cutting and over staffing nurses. Plesse do literature review and articles on how this situation falls strictly on poor choices made by leadership. But then again I don’t know who you are or what you do but I’m sure you’ll have some out landish reason without a solid understanding of how and why they contributed to this shortage.
Jason will be happy to hear Kaweah will get $50 million from the great thinkers in Sac. Maybe dont have to pay back says the CEO.
At least they can restore bonuses to the C suites and then some. Whew. I was worried about that.
Those top notch execs do ok. Even the Head Nurse gets $400k. All public record.
The CEO says they made a $1M profit this past qtr. Is this a not for profit ? So why the big cry over how they are going broke ?
Jason is correct. Its horrendous management. 1M $ for ‘rebranding”. Millions lost on the VMC debacle. Horrid record of deaths with covid patients in the ICU – maybe the worst in the state.
“Healthgrades” is a business. Pay to play. No one else pays so they dont get rated. Its a scam but it sounds good to the easily scammed citizens of the district.
The CEO has made an art form of blaming nurses and medi-cal for all his woes. Didnt they get $40 M$ in Cares Act cash? Where’d it go ? Gross incompetence.
Kaweah and Adventist and their ilk are businesses like any other. ‘cept they can hold their beggars cup out and make easy money. Ask yourself, what would be missed if Kaweah hospital, or Tulare, or any of these small town hospitals went away. It would not be a fiasco. The market always fills the void. Always.
Honest question: Do you really think anyone would fill the vacuum if Kaweah Delta closed it’s doors and Adventist decided to exit its lease in Tulare?
What “market” entity would without a heavy incentive, take on a payer mix weighted heavily towards Medi-Cal & buildings that have the Sword of Damocles hanging over them due to seismic requirements?
Remember, the only ones that put up any sort of fight in Tulare were Adventist and Community…… at least they were the only ones to send people to a Tulare Regional board meeting.
If those two events were to take place, the majority of Tulare County would be left flooding Sierra View or headed to Fresno, Hanford, or Bakersfield.
What healthcare entities would “always” rush to the rescue with those circumstances?
I guess the lesson here Jason, and Timmy T, is you both need to not only include all the facts in your comments but also remember what you’ve said. Just read articles that are being published and again, don’t be selective in what you chose to use to push your message. $40M in Cares Act Cash “where’d it go?” Since the start of COVID the District has lost over $140M. So that $40 probably went toward covering that loss…. Unfortunately the “gross incompetence” could not cover a $140M loss with just $40M, I’m sure you could have done better. Jason I also took your advice and read the board minutes. You’re right, cuts to pay were made this year. However not what you tried to suggest. Budget maintains the health system’s current 5,100 positions, includes full annual pay raises, and maintains all current employment benefits and 401(k) plan matching funds. Also have frozen the health insurance premium rates paid by employees so that they will not pay more for insurance than they did last year, despite inflation and increasing costs to Kaweah. The only cuts were made to the director and executive level. Which, they can afford to defer compensation. However there is nothing, at least that I could find, that says anything about cut in pay to nursing staff. Yet you continue to push that narrative. Even after telling you of those I know who actually work there, you choose to ignore that and act as if you know more. The banter has been interesting. But when you choose to continue to have an unproductive dialog, the ability for change and reason is squashed. Best of luck! I’m sure you’ll have a critical and degrading response.
Susan, please show me the minutes you read 😂😂😂 they are not matching any retirement contubutions, god lord 🤦🏿♂️
Doesn’t matter much they will not accept a Medicare Advantage insurance