NEWS

MSU Women's Healthcare closure displaces thousands of patients

RJ Wolcott
Lansing State Journal

EAST LANSING - Michigan State University administrators told physicians and staff at its Women's Healthcare clinic on May 5 of a plan to close the clinic by June 30.

That timeline would have given patients less than 60 days to find new doctors.

Concerns that the clinic's more than 200 pregnant patients, among them 80 who were in the third trimester, could miss out on necessary appointments because of the sudden closure were brought forward by Dr. Nancy Herta, an OB-GYN physician, and her fellow caregivers, she said.

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By the time approximately 4,000 letters went out on May 17 to patients who visited the clinic within the past three years, the closure of the facility at 1200 E. Michigan Ave. in Lansing was delayed until Aug. 16 in an effort to accommodate pregnant women whose due dates were prior to July 31.

Those with due dates after July 31 were referred to other area clinics.

It's been traumatic for staff as well as patients, Herta said.

“It’s been horrible,” Herta said. “I’ve been in this community 20 years and it’s been very difficult to say goodbye to everyone and have to say to them, ‘go find a new doctor.'”

MSU cited the loss of two key physicians — Dr. Jairam Rajan and Dr. Denny Martin — as the reason for the clinic’s closure in the letter sent to patients.

The loss of Martin and Rajan, coupled with longstanding financial losses incurred by the clinic, meant keeping the practice going was not feasible, MSU spokesman Jason Cody said.

“The doctors leaving represented a significant loss in clinical care,” Cody said, noting their loss represents a one-third cut in clinical care time.

MSU's $800,000 in annual losses from running the clinic would have grown by roughly $300,000 per doctor during the two-year recruitment and hiring process if the university wanted to replace Martin and Rajan, Cody said.

But Herta said she and two female caregivers had more than twice as much time devoted to clinical work than the two departing doctors. MSU staffing records for the clinic's physicians backed up Herta's statement.

Physicians at the clinic regularly met their goals for the number of patients seen, Herta said, and were seeing a higher number of patients than similar academic hospitals. MSU's goals were more in line with private clinics, Herta said, as opposed to similar academic clinics that focus on educating medical students.

"It's very possible there were some financial issues, but I don’t think MSU has any evidence it was due to the number of patients being seen or how busy we were," Herta said.

Rajan’s retirement should have come as no surprise to MSU, Herta said, because his intention upon joining the clinic was to resettle his patients before retiring. MSU could have let the clinic operate as a two-doctor practice, as it had done in the past, but ultimately chose not to, she added.

“I had a very short window of time to recommend practices to my patients,” Herta said. "So many of them I didn’t have an opportunity to speak with. I only had contact with patients that I had already scheduled appointments with.”

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Rajan's departure wasn’t a surprise to MSU, Cody said, but losing Martin was. The fact that the small clinic needs someone on call 24/7 and had thousands of patients meant MSU couldn’t continue backing it, he added. Support staff at the clinic were relocated to other jobs at MSU. Of the two nurses and three physicians at the clinic, all but one doctor took up MSU's offer for placement assistance at MSU or a nearby clinic, Cody added. Herta said she is that doctor, and that her employment at MSU ends in September.

Talks of growing the clinic lured Herta back to MSU in 2014. She had worked at the clinic from 1999 to 2004 and left after she and her fellow providers weren’t given details on financial stresses the practice was supposedly under at the time, she said. She frequently sat in on sessions during that time where administrators would tell physicians they weren’t seeing enough patients.

By December 2015, financial stresses again became a frequent topic of discussion. Rumors of all kinds, from the clinic shutting down to hiring more staff to selling to McLaren Greater Lansing, circulated.

The clinic's future looked brighter when Bridget Burns-King, a former nurse practitioner at the clinic, went on maternity leave in April. One week after having her baby, she found out MSU had decided to close the practice.

“It was heartbreaking,” she said. “Our staff was great and provided a huge service to a large number of women in the area.”

MSU did not make administrators within the MSU HealthTeam or the MSU College of Human Medicine available for this story.

Rick Ward, CEO of the MSU HeathTeam, issued the following statement:

“Closing a health care practice is a very difficult decision, and it is not one the MSU HealthTeam and the College of Human Medicine took lightly in this case. We understand the difficulty this caused for some of our patients, and we worked diligently to ensure a seamless transition of their care to new physicians in the community. Unfortunately, the recent loss of key providers made keeping the small practice open unsustainable.”

Contact RJ Wolcott at (517) 377-1026 or rwolcott@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @wolcottr.