Enlightened self-interest has OMHS uniquely positioned
to address local region’s core medical pathologies

Owensboro Medical Health System is located in what used to be known as the Fast Food Capital of the World because Owensboro, in the western Kentucky Tobacco Belt, ate more of the franchise fare per capita than anyplace else in the country. But OMHS is helping to change the area’s health and lifestyle with facilities and prevention-and-treatment care that directly attack the surrounding 10-county region’s core pathology of smoking- and obesity-related diseases.

According to Dr. Jeff Barber, OMHS’s CEO, the OMHS medical emphasis is in the best interests of his institution as well as the people living in the vicinity, even though OMHS estimates that only 3 percent of health care spending goes towards prevention, with the rest addressing treatment. Among other things, OMHS has given $372,000 to help build the local school system’s 11 fitness centers, which keep the students busy with 30 to 60 minutes of continuous activity at a variety of exercise stations.

“The payback we get is to have a healthier student population, which grows up to be a healthier workforce,” Barber explains. “We recruit, and the vast majority of our employees come from our community. It’s cyclical in nature: if we have a healthy population which does better in school it grows up to be a productive workforce, so we see it as an investment in our community and in our future at OMHS.”

It’s part of the OMHS mission to make Daviess County, where it’s located, the healthiest county in Kentucky. One special manifestation of that mission is the HealthPark which OMHS built five years ago to offer a mix of outpatient diagnostic care programs along with health-and-wellness education and exercise facilities.

Health parks tied to medical institutions aren’t unheard of. Barber came from a health system in northern Mississippi that had one, but OMHS’s version has a singular purpose.

“What makes this one unique over the others I’ve seen is that, while others take the approach of being more like substitutes for a YMCA or a fitness center, ours not only focuses on fitness and physical education, but also on rehab, education and prevention programs, health fairs and all kinds of community activities that attract people into the health park so they can get training on how to treat diabetes and other health and chronic conditions they have,” Barber reports.

HealthPark patrons also learn how to prevent and seek early detection and diagnosis of disease so that there can be earlier intervention in the disease process. “All of that is programmed in as a focus, so it’s not just fitness.” Barber stresses. “It goes way beyond that.”

With both smoking and obesity, Owensboro Medical Health Center uses the same kind of “attack pattern – education, prevention, diagnosis and treatment” to address the problems in Daviess County and environs, says Barber.

“We are one of the unhealthiest counties in the U.S. from the perspective of having a heavy smoking population, so we have to provide a lot of education about the effects of smoking and programs for smoking cessation, and we have to attack the different age cohorts with different types of information so that the younger-age population doesn’t get started and those who have been smoking for a long time know how to stop,” Barber comments. Obesity programs focus on diet-related diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. “It’s all about improving your lifestyle and making better choices,” he says.

The awareness campaign extends beyond OMHS’s doors and into churches and schools. All of this Bible Belt city’s churches have members among OMHS’s workforce and they’re asked to take information out to their congregations and parishes for distribution. “We also ask them to become involved in health fairs and act as church or parish or congregation nurse and provide them with diagnostic opportunities like blood sugar tests and bone density screens, among others,” tells Barber.

The implications of these lifestyle-related ailments extend to the healing process as well. The region’s high rates of smoking and diabetes is why OMHS also has a Wound Healing Center. People who smoke and have diabetes heal more slowly than other people, so the Center takes measures to prevent the breakdown in soft tissue and epidermis. “We’ve just purchased a lot of new mattresses, for example, so that patients leaving the hospital don’t leave with ulcers or skin breakdowns,” Barber says. For another example, OMHS’s orthopedic group will only perform surgeries on smokers who have quit and won’t smoke again at least until they’re out of rehab.

Ultimately, adds Barber, the Wound Center “is really a function of certain demographics and specific diseases we find here”.

Like the rest of the nation, OMHS has to cope with the cost pressures created by an aging workforce and general population who are high-frequency users of health care products and services. To track the perennial demand for more doctors that this phenomenon creates, OMHS has a rolling five-year plan in place which sets targets for how many physicians it will need to recruit. “We have 208 physicians on staff. We should have about 280 to address all the pathology that’s within our population in the 10-county area we serve,” observes Barber.

In consecutive months last spring, OMHS opened new cancer and cardiac care facilities – necessary moves in light of the diseases related to smoking and obesity. OMHS has just begun a residency collaboration with the University of Louisville as well, which will boost its recruiting efforts, particularly in anesthesiology. Barber wants to expand that linkage to a general surgery, too, and is working on setting up a residency program at Murray State University for a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA).

Yet another affiliation, between OMHS and Jewish Heart & Lung Institute in Louisville, beefs up cardiac surgery expertise. OMHS has recruited two cardio-thoracic surgeons who specialize in Warm Heart Procedure, an off-pump open-heart surgery method where the patient isn’t put on a heart-lung machine. This lets patients recover more quickly and reduces the mortality and morbidity rate. “The national average for open-heart procedures is 2 percent, and ours is zero,” Barber declares.

Warm Heart. More than a procedure, it reflects Owensboro Medical Health Center’s holistic approach to caring for its community’s most pressing medical problems.