My phone has been ringing off the hook again. This time related to PeaceHealth firing the local Emergency Department physicians at Riverbend Hospital.
Before we analyze the article, let’s breakdown the local medical scene since I’ve moved to town in 2011. The Eugene-Springfield area has two hospitals that bill themselves as Community Hospitals: McKenzie Willamette Medical Center (owned by Quorum) and Riverbend (owned by PeaceHealth) (formerly there was a third, University District).
Context
- In approx 2014, PeaceHealth fired all of their Hospitalist physicians and asked them to reapply for a job through a staffing agency called Sound Physicians. This led the Hospitalists to form the first Hospitalist Union in the country.
- Trillium had been the sole company responsible for managing medicaid/OHP dollars in Lane County. In 2015, the local nonprofit group Trillium sold themselves to the national for-profit corporation, Centene. When this happened, a small group of local shareholders received many millions of dollars of corporate payouts.
- There used to be a local group of Pulmonary/Critical Care physicians who served our community at both hospitals. However, they were not awarded the contract from McKenzie Willamette and later Riverbend severed their contract with the group and outsourced the ICU staffing to the corporation Sound Physicians.
- (Sound Physicians used to be privately owned by physicians but now is owned by a Privaty Equity Group, one of the major shareholders is United HealthCare).
- In 2020, McKenzie Willamette fired their local Hospitalist Physicians and required them to reapply for their jobs through Sound Physicians, who provides Hospitalist staffing services there.
- Oregon Medical Group used to be a privately owned multispecialty physician group. However, they sold themselves to Optum Healthcare in 2022ish. (Optum is owned by United HealthCare).
- In 2025, Optum in Eugene closed its OB-Gyn department.
- This closure has had a huge impact on McKenzie Willamette trying to maintain their Labor and Delivery Services (and support the OB-GYN needs of women in the Emergency Department or inpatients)
- Now, PeaceHealth is firing the local Emergency Department Group and asking them to reapply for their jobs through a corporate staffing agency based in Georgia, Apollo.
Article Analysis
I’ll summarize the article, ED wait times are long so we’ve fired the local group and we’re hiring a corporation to fix the problem. Most people would assume this means the local group of ED physicians are terrible and it’s time to bring in some big guns to help things out. However, Riverbend leadership goes on to say they intend to re-hire all the physicians, just through the staffing agency.
Interpretation: well the docs must be pretty good, after all. If the docs are good, then why hire a staffing agency? I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about what is happening here.
Let me leave you with two thoughts.
One, these local doctors live in Eugene-Springfield. They have family here, send their kids to school here, buy homes here, support the local economy here and have built a life here. In other words, they are committed to Here.
Two, moving a sick person from the outpatient/community world through the Emergency Department and into the hospital is a very complex task that involves multiple cumbersome and conflicting systems. Anybody with training in teams and systems knows that solving Riverbend ED wait times will require almost every single team in the Riverbend Hospital working together in innovative ways.
If you agree with that statement, then why is the community solution to ED wait times replacing the local community ED group with an outside staffing agency rather than a strengths-based team approach implemented throughout the entire local hospital system?
Physicians want to practice great medicine while living authentically so they can take care of their families and show up for their communities.
-Dr. Joe
Transformational Physician Coach
Workplaces at Their Best certified VIA Strengths based consultant
Photo by Mpho Mojapelo on Unsplash
