Friday, April 10, 2009

The chilling cost of budget cuts - life hanging in the balance

When the leadership of Santa Clara County and The Santa Clara Valley Health & Hospital System decided to spend 20 million dollars on
So what does this mean? VMC just expanded its cancer care. With our new Sobrato Cancer Center, we’re serving more people than ever before...we're still hurting, but we're still here.

What if our county leadership hadn’t done this? The results could have been devastating, as it is today in Las Vegas. If you saw 60 Minutes last week, you know what I’m talking about. University Medical Center just closed their cancer clinic due to budget cuts.

It's worth ten minutes to watch this, seriously:
Watch CBS Videos Online

Their patients see it as a death sentence, though many are trying to get area hospitals to take them…and they are searching further and further from Las Vegas. Soon, we expect, some may knock on Valley Medical Center’s door.

And VMC will answer. Thanks, county leadership. Thanks, Deloitte.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Chris,

Do you have a link to the Deloitte proposal that you can share? Are they the ones that recommended the new "Elmer" system?

From what I can tell, Elmer, with it's added burdens and minimal benefits, has at great cost, both direct and indirect, so far made everyone less productive.

Do you know when the Nexgen system will be able to be connected to the Siemens and other systems? If it is far off, given the dire budget, wouldn't it make sense to put a "wrapper"/front-end around Elmer so that it would be at least as productive as the old system in the interim?

I'm eager to read what the new group of consultants recommends. If they ignore the negative impact of Elmer it will be hard to take their assessment seriously.

Regards,

Casey

Chris Wilder said...

Hi Casey,

If you share with me your email address, I can share with you some Deloitte info. I can tell you that they had nothing to do with ELMR, and I'm sorry to hear all the trouble it's causing.

Being the director of the Foundation, I don't typically get involved in the details of tech at HHS...but I can direct you to folks who can. shoot me an email: ehristopher.wilder@hhs.sccgov.org