The hospital declined to discuss Valle’s care, citing patient privacy. But 17 months before her three-day ordeal, Tennova had outsourced its emergency rooms to American Physician Partners, a medical staffing company owned by private equity investors. APP employs fewer doctors in its ERs as one of its cost-saving initiatives to increase earnings, according to a confidential company document obtained by KHN and NPR.

The surprising reason why you aren’t guaranteed to see a doctor when you go to the ER

bizgrrl's picture

Outsourcing healthcare in

Outsourcing healthcare in this manner should be illegal.

Two of the largest outsourcing healthcare providers are located in Tennessee, Envision Healthcare in Nashville and Teamhealth in Knoxville.

jbr's picture

I am surprised there are not

I am surprised there are not federal regulations regarding how many doctors an ER should have
on duty. An ER is no place to be cutting corners.

fischbobber's picture

Agreed.

Now, not only is the county in default on our agreement with AMR, our ambulance provider, now we get news that two out of our five emergency rooms are going to be run under this business model. For all intents and purposes, we no longer have emergency care in Knox County. All our emergency rooms are understaffed and full, almost always, but we're now cutting back on essential services beyond sinking below a minimum service requirement.

I'm not going to say whether or not this is a terrorist attack against our county by various government officials against the citizens of Knox County, but, if it were, this is exactly how one would do it. Brainwash the population into rejecting standard pandemic mitigation protocols and then destroy the healthcare infrastructure, so those that do get sick have no treatment options. Then, branch out and create artificial provider shortages to women and diabetics. Force your cancer patients to travel for state of the art care and trials, because, of course recruiting researchers and scientists to Knox County becomes increasingly difficult. This situation is nowhere near as bad as it's going to get.

Allowing our Board of Health to be disbanded, without consequence for those who participated in that attack against the citizens was just the first step. Not only is the personnel infrastructure collapsing, but two thirds of our beds are currently unstaffed. That means that the business plans for our healthcare industry as well is collapsing. Withy the demands of modern corporate profit structures, we won't be keeping unused facility around long. They'll just downsize. We can't handle a bad school bus crash, much less an airplane crash of major train derailment at this level. And we have no one qualified with experience in our County Health department to even make these sorts of planning decisions and negotiations.

With the County in default on our agreement with AMR, we are totally at their mercy and sense of community goodwill as to whether or not we even have ambulance service. We're lucky to be dealing with a business that takes it's mission seriously. Should they decide to sue the County for damage to their reputation, considering they are a major national company, the County could be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars. Easily tens of millions.

This situation isn't going away. The same people that destroyed our system are the ones in charge of fixing it. I'm not holding my breath.

bizgrrl's picture

(No subject)

"that two out of our five emergency rooms are going to be run under this business model."

Which ones?

fischbobber's picture

Tennova runs Turkey Creek and Powell/NothKnox County

They're one of the folks using this model. I guess we'll just plan our emergencies around their work schedules. Surely a doctor is in there somewhere.

yellowdog's picture

capitalist health care is capitalism

that can kill you...or destroy your town like East Palestine, Ohio

fischbobber's picture

Let's not forget the rest of our happy news.

Federal funding for covid ends on May 11. That means that someone local, or state is going to have to pick up the tab for the uninsured. Cocktail napkin math based on weekly published statistics, puts this num,ber at a little over a million a week. Hospitals, the County, City or state are going to have to either eat this, or deny care to covid patients. Covid is an ugly way to die. Prepare to watch it from a much closer seat than you have now.

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