The arrival of Baptist Health’s new Conway location in September, 2016, not only meant more capacity in the local health care market, it’s also inspired both the new arrival and the incumbent Conway Regional to deliver a consistently excellent patient experience.
“Competition always makes everybody better,” said Troy Wells, CEO of Little Rock-based Baptist Health, the largest health system in Arkansas. “That’s going to benefit the people in that region of the state over time quite a bit.”
“Clearly, it gives people choice, which in health care just like in any business, it’s always better to have choice,” said Matt Troup, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System. “You now have two options and I think a lot of people value that.”
The slate of medical services between the 154-bed Conway Regional and the 111-bed Baptist Hospital are nearly identical, therefore Troup said competitive advantage comes down to the institution that best executes its mission of providing quality care.
“We’ve got to ultimately perform at a high level because at the end of the day patients are going to choose where they go and we have to earn the privilege of being able to take care of them,” he said. “We tend to talk a lot in health care about change, about how the change is just overwhelming. At the end of the day, health systems like ours exist simply to serve people who are going through a difficult time. They’re hurting and they need our service.”
To meet that challenge, Conway Regional has recently focused efforts on market growth and strengthening internal staff and operations. The hospital added a clinic in Pottsville in the fall of 2016, its seventh in the region, and also has plans for major expansions to its clinic facilities in Vilonia and Clinton.
Also positioning the health system for growth is a new pediatric nursery alliance with Arkansas Children’s Hospital, the launch of a neuroscience center collaborative, introducing tomosynthesis (3D breast imaging technology) to Conway and a collaboration with St. Vincent Medical Group by Conway Regional staff cardiologists Dr. Donald Steely and Dr. Lensey Scott.
Internally, the hospital has reduced turnover and boosted patient satisfaction scores, the most recent of which placed the health system in the top 25th percentile in employee engagement and the top 11 percent for physician engagement. Troup said the improved scores were in part the result of fearlessly addressing known areas of opportunity.
“Our emergency room has not always had the best of all reputations, but we have really made significant strides there in the last several months,” he said. “We have seen significant improvement in our overall patient satisfaction in our emergency room, placing us in top 15 percent of hospitals our size.”
Baptist Health entered the market with a bang last fall. In addition to its brand new, $150 million, 260,000-SF hospital, the health center also opened a $20 million, 50,000-SF Women’s Center in February 2017 and work is currently underway on its $15 million medical office building to be completed this summer.
“Starting a brand-new facility from nothing is a challenge, for sure,” said Wells. “It’s a big financial investment and the start-up process and that first year of operations is a challenge. So far we’re right on target financially. That’s not the only measure and sometimes not the best measure, but it is comforting to know that we are investing what we thought we would have to invest to get it started correctly.”
Baptist has also built on an existing relationship with the University of Central Arkansas’ School of Nursing in Conway.
“We do some things clinically with UCA through our Baptist Health College,” Wells said. “We’ve got six programs at our college and nursing is the big one, but we’ve also got some other allied health programs and three of those have affiliations with UCA. I hope that having the nursing program there in Conway will also help us recruit future workforce to our facility there.”
Wells said while he hasn’t looked at enough patient data to see to what degree the new medical facility is helping to extend Baptist Health’s reach, he’s confident the health system is pushing the physical boundaries of its current service area of Faulkner, Conway Van Buren, Perry and Cleburne counties. In addition, he said, Baptist is helping make the city of Conway more attractive to prospective residents and relocating companies.
“People there are really trying to establish [Conway] as not just a suburb of Little Rock or a bedroom community,” Wells said. “It wants to be a destination community. So to the extent that health care can help contribute to that, I think it’s really a positive thing. From everything I’ve heard from the leaders in that community they believe that our facility and our presence there is going to help.”
See more about Conway’s economic growth at Outlook Conway.
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