2016 Dynamic Dozen No. 5: Citizens Memorial Healthcare

SBJ: What has been key to your recent growth?
Donald Babb: One is population growth. Two, are the specialty physicians we have recruited over the last three to five years, and the change in the health care environment. We’ve planned for that with our outpatient programs and efficiencies we have built.

SBJ: What has the company’s growth enabled you to do?
Babb: Actually, in the last couple of years we’ve added – in addition to our existing surgical center – an extra 80,000 square feet, so it’s about 120,000 square feet now. We have a lot of specialty physicians there, all of our outpatient surgery and procedures, our wound and hyperbaric center.  

We’ve added an eye center and an optic shop. We’ve added a new OBGYN clinic, a clinic with walk-in capability and a new Bolivar Technical College campus. We have an addition to the cancer center that will hopefully be started in the next nine to 12 months. We’re pretty well finished with the design and plans on a new long-term care facility that will be a 90-bed skilled facility we’ll build in Stockton. We’ve purchased some land adjacent to the hospital here and we’ll build a replacement for one of our long-term care facilities probably in the next couple of years. We have a new clinic starting at El Dorado Springs that will take about six or seven months to build.

SBJ: What are your top issues when it comes to managing growth?
Babb: Planning is the most important part and having the data that supports the projects. We look at demographics developed for the state and by the federal government on population growth. We also look at services populations go to and why they go, and we do that by ZIP code. We know if we’re going to put a service in Stockton or Buffalo, the data supports it.

SBJ: Is your fast growth sustainable?
Babb: The population growth we have will sustain that, and the plans we have for new physicians coming in to continually support that is a big component. We have four new physicians scheduled to come in this summer to early fall and an additional 16 that we’re recruiting for.

SBJ: Where do you see the company headed in the next five years?
Babb: Any new programs we haven’t developed we might take a look at, but we know where our bread and butter is and we’ll stay with our plan as we move forward. Probably four or five years ago we were doing about 8,000 visits a month in our clinics and [in March] we did 23,300-and-something visits. That population has been better than we expected it to be, and that initiates growth in other programs. Last year, we took over the management of Ellett Memorial Hospital in Appleton City. That’s been a good opportunity for us and a good partnership. There may be others of that type that we look at down the road.