CEO Talk: McCabe reflects on Community General acquisition five years later

SYRACUSE — Upstate University Hospital has spent the past five years fully integrating its July 2011 acquisition of Community General Hospital, which is now known as Upstate’s Community campus at 4900 Broad Road in the town of Onondaga. 

“For the last five years, I’ve told everybody this isn’t overnight. This is … a five-year plan. Now I’ve got to change. Maybe it’s the next five-year plan,” says Dr. John McCabe, CEO of Upstate University Hospital, who spoke with BJNN on July 21.

He called the acquisition a “very good match” because both organizations benefited. 

“They needed us because if something hadn’t happened there, the facility probably wouldn’t exist today. It would’ve been picked apart and it would’ve been a huge, empty lot and building up there,” says McCabe.

Upstate needed Community General because it “had no place to grow” to take care of patients who wanted Upstate’s services.

Upstate has 5,228 full-time employees across the two hospitals, according to BJNN Research data. Upstate University Hospital has 409 total beds while Upstate’s Community campus has 326 total beds, according to New York Department of Health data.

BJNN asked McCabe several questions about the acquisition five years later.

Has the Community acquisition unfolded the way you had anticipated?
“There’s two ways to do acquisitions. One way is you take something over. You toss out everything that’s old. You start over with your new program. We didn’t do that. We said we’re going to build this slowly. We’re going to build trust. We’re going to change some programs, and it will take us a little bit of time. The advantage of that is you have buy-in from everybody over time. The disadvantage is it’s a bumpy road to get there and we had some bumps early on. Some practitioners who decided to leave … some early finances that we had to juggle, but we stuck to it and I think five years later, we’re much better for it,” says McCabe.

How is the Community campus different now compared to five years ago?
“It’s still an acute-care hospital. There are still a lot of physicians in the community who use it as their primary hospital to care for the patients that they’ve always cared for there. We’ve made investments there … lots of examples of how the building and the grounds are in better shape than they were before. We’ve invested in equipment, so things like a CT scanner, an MRI, a new robot in the operating room, all new equipment for blood-pressure monitoring, and EKGs … so we’ve invested in the equipment so that there’s some commonality between the downtown and the Community campus. We’ve invested in people. We said everybody who worked there when we took over, you can still work here and we’ve grown staff since then. Lastly, we’ve put new programs in place … the geriatric emergency [medicine (Gem)] department … the Golisano after-hours urgent care for kids … our transitional-care unit … We’ve made some switches so that some things we used to do here [in downtown], we now do there. Probably the best example is our whole bariatric [weight-loss surgery] program [which we] moved there because it was a group of patients that really didn’t need to be here, so we moved them there,” says McCabe.

Looking ahead, what goals does Upstate still want to accomplish at the Community campus?
“Just continuing to grow some of the services that are either just budding or expanding … things like orthopedics. Now that we have a joint program between SOS [Syracuse Orthopedic Specialists], the large private orthopedic group, and our Upstate orthopedic faculty working together, so orthopedics has a lot of room to expand. Programs like urology. We have a little bit on that campus but our department would love to grow because it’s hard for them to grow a lot more downtown … We do have more investment in the facility … Our next big plan is to renovate the maternity suites in the postpartum [project], and that’s part of the growth of low-risk and medium-risk obstetrics there … The renovations will probably start this calendar year and probably won’t be done until the end of next year …it’s in the multi-million dollars, less than $10 [million],” says McCabe.

Is former Community General CEO Thomas Quinn still involved in the organization?
“Tom works here. He has since we took over. He now works half time. And he’s … been a special assistant to me, so he’s worked on a lot of our strategy issues. He’s worked on individual hospital projects and a lot of projects in and around the community and Central New York because he really knows the health-care community very well,” says McCabe.

What is the status of the 800 jobs retained at Community General? Are they private or public employees?
“When we acquired the facility, we moved everybody who was employed there to public-union employment … All the Upstate employees at Community are part of our public unions. One of the issues was that many of them had amassed retirement savings in the pension, which was a private pension at Community. One of the things were able to do in the acquisition was to get … a state law written that allowed Upstate to take over that pension and to run it on behalf of the employees. So when people came over to Upstate employment, they were offered the opportunity to enter employment in the public unions and be in the public-retirement programs or to continue in what was the Community General private program that was now being run by Upstate University Hospital … We’re unique. We’re probably the only state agency that is responsible for running a private retirement-pension plan,” says McCabe.

What is the cord-blood bank and its purpose?
“The cord blood bank is the building that is being built right behind the hospital [on Upstate’s Community Campus] … It’s going to open for business [in either] September or October. When women give birth, there’s blood cells …primordial blood cells within the placenta and the umbilical cord, and we can have someone in the delivery suite harvest and gather those cells. And then we can process them in this facility and store them. And why would you do that? Well, you would that for three reasons. One is because someone’s family developed a disease that could be treated with those cells. That’s what we call a private blood bank, so you save your own cells just in case you might need them down the road. That’s a very small part of what we’re going to do. The larger part is we would be saving the cord-blood cells for general use for anybody. And mostly that’s for treating some of the blood malignancies that people develop. Our storage facility would be part of a world-wide network of similar facilities that are storing cells to be used and moved around the world to help people. And, lastly, there’s a research piece. Sometimes, you don’t collect enough cells to have a viable product for clinical use but you can still save them and use them for research purposes,” says McCabe. 

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com