Kaiser Permanente grant will help Grady patients

Grady Memorial Hospital urgently needs new equipment for its trauma center and fewer patients for its busy emergency room. Thanks to a gift from medical insurer Kaiser Permanente, both needs will be addressed.

Most of a $5 million grant recently announced by Kaiser is aimed at providing primary medical care to 1,000 chronically ill poor people for a year. About $2 million of the grant will go to replace the aging equipment in Grady’s trauma center — the only Level 1 trauma center in North Georgia and the busiest in the state.

No doubt many of the patients who will be helped by the Kaiser grant have turned to Grady in the past for emergency treatment, probably after failing to get routine care for diabetes, high blood pressure and other chronic conditions. Without primary care, those patients deteriorate and end up getting expensive emergency room treatment. Last year alone, Grady had to absorb about $40 million for the care of patients who have no insurance.

Helping control the flow of patients from the emergency room into Grady’s medical and surgical wards is one of the biggest challenges facing the hospital’s new CEO Michael Young. The hospital will never be able to attract insured patients for elective surgeries and other procedures if it is under constant siege by uninsured Fulton and DeKalb residents who turn to it as their medical safety net. Because they are so sick when they show up in the emergency room, they need to be hospitalized longer, which in turn increases their cost of care. Breaking that cycle is the key to Grady’s survival.

It’s no coincidence that the Kaiser grant comes just as Young has begun to assemble a new team to take over Grady, which has been hampered over the years by the political mismanagement of the Fulton-DeKalb authority. Last spring, the authority ceded day-to-day control to a nonprofit board of directors who hired Young with the promise of turning the hospital around. Because of that change in governance, the Woodruff foundation, Atlanta’s largest philanthropy, promised $200 million over the next four years for new equipment and other capital needs. The Kaiser grant is another very public endorsement that things have changed at Grady.

Young started work earlier this month and has already begun shaking up the institution and the community it serves. Among other things, he has personally been reviewing every expenditure over $1,000, looking to spot wasteful trends. He’s also put other metro hospitals on notice that he’ll be watching Grady’s emergency room to see if it is getting poor patients that should have been treated elsewhere.

Thomas Bell, a member of the new Grady board, said he hopes the change in management will encourage other Atlanta companies and their charitable foundations to follow Kaiser’s lead.

“This is a new day” for Grady, he said. “This gets us off on the right foot.”

— Mike King, for the editorial board (mking@ajc.com)