On Feb. 1, Dr. Frank Romero started work as chief medical officer for CoxHealth’s Springfield and Monett hospitals, succeeding Dr. Dan Sontheimer, who moved to Florida. A board-certified internal medicine physician, Romero joined CoxHealth in 2002 as the system’s first hospitalist, and he has 17 years of clinical experience, including 11 years of physician leadership. As medical director of CoxHealth’s Springfield Inpatient Physicians, the hospitalist group grew to more than 40 providers caring for hospitalized patients. Dr. Mark Entrup was named medical director of Springfield Inpatient Physicians.
Project No. 1 “My duties overall are the oversight of our Cox facilities regarding patient safety, quality, medical staff issues, appointments, credentialing and privileging. … My short-term goals are to get up to speed as fast as possible. There are a lot of projects in the health system that I have not been involved in, so I have a lot of learning to do as to the history of some of those. One that was handed to me right away – the University of Missouri is planning on having a medical school/clinical campus here in Springfield, and I will be heavily involved in that process. I have already been to several meetings regarding that, and I will be helping to facilitate Cox’s role in getting the third- and fourth-year medical students here in town. I believe the timeline would start that in 2015.”
MU Medical Recruitment “Cox and Mercy are working together to find a location – a building, a clinical campus, that can house some of its faculty and an associate dean there and provide some of the classroom education in that facility. Then, students would rotate through both Cox and Mercy to receive their clinical clerkships. … MU’s current class is 96 medical students and it is hoping to expand that by 2016 to 128 with about 60 of those – 32 in each class – coming to Springfield. That’s 32 third-year and 32 fourth-year students. We’re hoping that if they get their education here, they will want to come and practice medicine in this area.”
Specializing in Specialists “We are obviously building a new patient tower and we are going to have other probable needs in medical staff involved and getting all the specialties we need. … Right now, some of those needs revolve around pediatric medicine. We are looking at recruiting different types of pediatric specialists (and) collaborating with Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis to provide different specialty coverage. We also are working with the University of Missouri right now to bring down orthopedic trauma surgeons.”
The Hospital Doctor “My training is in internal medicine. Historically, most physicians who have an office practice go to the hospital, as well. My training was very traditional in that regard. When I first came to Cox, I had a traditional internal medicine practice. Then, there were a lot of family physicians in town who were not wanting to come to the hospital, so myself and a physician I was partners with at the time, Dr. Entrup, decided we would take care of their patients if they were to come to the hospital. That developed over a prolonged period of time into us covering more than 20 physicians’ patients when they’d come to the hospital. The national trend was very similar to that where there were providers, usually family physicians, who didn’t want to come into the hospital. I found myself doing a lot of hospital work compared to my office work, and Cox became interested – along with many other hospitals around the country – in having dedicated physicians in their hospitals. I chose to give up my outpatient practice and dedicate my time to seeing patients in the hospital exclusively.”
The Practice “About 20 percent of my time will be dedicated to practicing medicine still, and 80 percent will be administrative. … As somebody who developed hospital-based physicians during the last 12 years, I got to learn a lot about the inner-workings of the hospital. … In the last three or four years, because of being medical director for the hospitalists and being responsible for 43 providers, I had already had a cutback in my patient-contact hours. I’m hoping this is the last cutback I have to make.”[[In-content Ad]]
