Hospitals pool their resources as health care systems

Q: What is the real reason hospitals are adding abbreviations in front of their names, e.g. HSHS St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, SSM St. Mary’s Hospital, and others?

Jim Sabella, of O’Fallon

A: Whether you need a family doc or a major heart operation, hospitals that belong to a health-care system want you to consider a popular old adage: There’s strength in numbers.

That’s why for the past few months, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Belleville has started to emphasize that it belongs to a group of 13 hospitals known as the Hospital Sisters Health System (HSHS). The same is true of SSM Health, of St. Louis, which owns 20 hospitals and has affiliations with more than 40 other rural institutions.

“Being part of a health-care system communicates strength, a united commitment to the future and growth opportunity for both patients and colleagues,” St. Elizabeth’s President and CEO Peg Sebastian told me. “Integrated systems such as ours benefit by sharing resources, technologies and best practices. It also helps in physician recruiting and overall purchasing power for the day-to-day equipment and supplies.”

It’s a far cry from 1844, when the Rev. Christopher Bernsmeyer founded an order of religious women, the Sisters of Charity. Its mission: to help the needy and provide medical care in their homes.

In 1875, three of these sisters traveled 28 days from their motherhouse in Muenster, Germany, to Belleville. They quickly turned an old St. Peter’s parish schoolhouse into a primitive hospital, which barely had room for the sisters to live and, during emergencies, six patients. Otherwise, medical care was still delivered in the home.

Clearly, this situation could not continue, so, in 1880, the sisters built a 58-bed hospital on the grounds where St. Elizabeth’s sits today. By then, the Sisters of Charity had become the Hospital Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis. In the 135 years since, the Belleville campus has expanded many times over with medical office buildings, the Southern Illinois Heart Institute and other facilities. Now, of course, the hospital is working on its move to O’Fallon.

But, as Sebastian said, the hospital wants to keep reminding you that it is part of a group of 13 hospitals in 12 cities in Wisconsin and Illinois known as the Hospital Sisters Health System, which was created in 1978, in part, to meet modern business challenges. As such, it can draw on the talents of 2,200 doctors on staff while handling 79,000 inpatients and hundreds of thousands of outpatients each year with operating revenue of $2.1 billion.

It is now the 13th largest acute-care hospital system in the nation. As such, all hospitals in the system in 2010 adopted a similar logo featuring a stylized version of the tau, which is the Greek letter that symbolizes the religious order. Then, within the past year, the hospitals began adding HSHS to stress their family of services under one system.

You’ll hear much the same story at SSM Health, another Catholic, not-for-profit health-care system. It traces its roots to the 1870s, when Mother Mary Odilia Berger and four other sisters were caring for the sick and wounded soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Facing religious persecution, they left Germany in 1872 for St. Louis, where they also began caring for the sick in patients’ homes.

In the winter of 1872, a smallpox epidemic hit St. Louis, which led residents to start calling their new health-care providers “the Smallpox Sisters.” In 1874, they officially became known as the Sisters of St. Mary because their convent was located in the St. Mary of Victories parish near the riverfront. Three years later, the sisters borrowed $16,000 to open their first hospital, St. Mary’s Infirmary.

Today, the system has 20 hospitals in four states with more than 8,500 doctors on its medical staff. So, like St. Elizabeth’s, it wants prospective patients to know that it can draw on the knowledge and power of these resources at any time.

Q: As of Sunday, the post office was supposed to reduce postage rates on first-class mail. I thought they were going bankrupt, yet they want to lower revenue? What's the truth? Has it ever happened before?

A: You can’t put all the blame on the beleaguered U.S. Postal Service. In 2014, the USPS and the U.S. Congress worked out one of those deals with the devil. But at the moment, the post office is feeling as licked as their stamps used to be.

Two years ago, Congress allowed the post office to up the price of a first-class stamp 3 cents to raise $4.6 billion — but they put a two-year limit on the increase. After that, the price would revert to 46 cents while rising only at the rate of inflation. Obviously, the post office hoped that the economic recovery would produce enough inflation so it could keep the 3-cent increase and then some.

It didn’t happen. As any Social Security recipient knows, inflation has barely budged the past few years. So now, barring congressional action, it’s time to pay the piper: Figuring in inflation, the post office had to give 2 cents back. Postcards go down a penny and parcel rates are dipping as well. In all, the post office says it will lose $2 billion a year, so it is begging Congress to establish a more realistic rate structure with greater pricing flexibility to meet changing demands.

“Removing the surcharge and reducing our prices is an irrational outcome considering the Postal Service’s precarious financial condition,” Postmaster General Megan Brennan stated in a prepared statement two months ago. “Our current pricing regime is unworkable.”

However, the drop is not unprecedented, although I don’t suppose many of you will remember when first-class stamp prices dropped from 3 cents to 2 cents — in July 1919.

Today’s trivia

Who was St. Elizabeth, the patron saint of Belleville’s hospital?

Answer to Sunday’s trivia: In 1983, Oprah Winfrey was hired by WLS-TV in Chicago to take over its 30-minute morning program “AM Chicago,” which was last in the ratings. Within months, she had overtaken Phil Donahue for the top spot, and the show was expanded to an hour. Then came the suggestion that changed everything: While on one of his two dates with Oprah, famed film critic Roger Ebert convinced her to take her show national as Ebert treated her to dinner at Hamburger Hamlet. For the full story, see www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/how-i-gave-oprah-her-start.

This story was originally published April 12, 2016 at 1:47 AM with the headline "Hospitals pool their resources as health care systems."