Capella officials sing hospital’s praises

By CHARLES W. JOHNSON / News Editor for the Southern Standard

Capella officials were in town at River Park Hospital on Wednesday. (Charles W. Johnson photo)

Newly formed Capella Healthcare, which recently took the reins of River Park Hospital after purchasing it earlier this year from HCA, held its first official board of directors meeting at the facility Wednesday.

The meeting was attended by a number of company officials including CEO Daniel S. Slipkovich, president and co-founder Tom Anderson, and Joe Nolan and Dean Mihas, representatives of GTCR, the company that helped provide financial backing.

A reception followed the meeting where hospital staff, local physicians and business people, along with local media, got the opportunity to meet and talk with Capella officials about their plans for Warren County’s largest medical facility.

“It was an opportunity to get our board members and GTCR board members here to visit the hospital,” Slipkovich said, “to be visible, to meet with the management, with some of the physicians and get a chance to see the community.”

Slipkovich said he sees a great future for River Park, and plans are to make the hospital one of the premier medical facilities in the area so that residents can get a broad range of health care right here at home.

“You have a great community, a strong medical staff,” Slipkovich said. “But we see an opportunity where people are still leaving town for health care, so it’s trying to work with the hospital board, work with the medical community, to figure out why.”

Slipkovich says there are several questions the company plans to address.

“How do you expand services, how do you recruit physicians and really meet the community needs in a bigger way,” Slipkovich said.

According to Slipkovich, expanding technology will be an important part of that effort.

“How do you make a difference,” Slipkovich said. “It’s really easy, make sure we provide the technology, the equipment, the physicians, etc. Make sure that those are in the community and, as I talked about, you’ll keep people in town for their health care.”

Anderson said Capella plans to have a hands-on approach with its management style.

“We want to have our board meetings for the first year at each of the four hospitals,” Anderson said, “and we selected River Park for our first board meeting. It went really well. We’re very happy with our position at this point in time with the four hospitals that we have, and we’re delighted to be here at this beautiful facility.

“And things are going well here,” Anderson continued. “We’re already making some strides here relative to recruitment of physicians, so we’re looking forward to being able to work with this facility and this community.”