Finding balance

Balance is an important concept to Jeff Mincy. As he takes over the administrative leadership of the Platte Valley Clinic and the Saratoga Care Center, which he will lead until the North Platte Valley Medical Center opens in August, he says it’s important to balance four things for the success of the healthcare system: clinical care, customer service, financial responsibility and employee satisfaction.

“These four things have to be in balance to provide long-term, quality healthcare to a community,” Mincy said. “One of my goals will be to provide that balance.”

Mincy took over as CEO for HMS, the management company that oversees operations for the clinic and care center and will assume the same role when NPVMC is complete. He was formerly clinic administrator and director of patient experience as well as the safety/emergency management coordinator for the Coryell County Hospital Authority in Gatesville, TX since 2009. He was responsible for physician contracting and compliance oversite, financial oversite and oversite for customer service which saw large gains during his tenure.

“Customer service is really important to me,” Mincy said. “There’s nothing hard about being thoughtful and nice to people.” As director of patient experience at Coryell County, Mincy saw their patient satisfaction score rise from 3.2 to 5 stars.

Mincy said that his experience as a hospital corpsman with the U.S. Navy was a real foundation for his work in rural healthcare. He said that although he was formally trained as a lab tech, during his service he also learned the skills and served as an x-ray technologist, a pharmacy tech and an operating room technician.

“We had to cover each other and have a broad understanding of the healthcare situation,” Mincy said, noting that these are also qualities needed in the rural healthcare setting. Although Mincy trained at San Diego, Corpus Christi and San Antonio, three years of his service was as a corpsman at a small clinic in Sasebo, Japan where he oversaw emergency services and ambulance system as well as the laboratory. In his last four years of service, he was stationed at Kingsville, TX, where he was trained in search and rescue and began work to earn a paramedic certification.  

After separating from the Navy in 1997, Mincy worked for multiple EMS agencies before joining Coryell County Hospital Authority as the EMT director in 2009. While at Coryell, he attended the Texas Tech University Health Science Center where he earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in healthcare management.

Mincy said that the hospital’s board of directors didn’t like the business structure they had, which called for them to shift patients to a larger hospital 45 miles away and instead wanted to provide the highest degree of healthcare they could for their own community. By adopting a Critical Access Hospital model similar to NPVMC and sharing the cost of medical specialists with small hospitals in nearby towns, Coryell grew considerably over the next few years.

As he grew to become clinic administrator and director of patient experience, Mincy said he learned the importance of customer service and in seeking to provide excellence in patient care. “It didn’t happen all at once, but people began to see a small hospital like ours as a medical home,” Mincy said, adding that he saw the key to success in Gatesville as well as Saratoga is a focus on being kind and compassionate as well as competent.

As word about the new North Platte Valley Medical Center spread, Mincy said they have been getting a steady stream of resumes from physicians and other providers inquiring about open positions. Mincy said he was confident NPVMC would have no problem fielding a team of qualified providers because many providers have second homes in the area have already reached out to him about being able to provide care when they are in the area.

Mincy is also confident that the non-profit 501(c)3 model under which the facility is operating will be financially viable well into the future. He explained that critical access hospitals are reimbursed differently from regular Medicare and Medicaid. Typically, hospitals are paid a flat fee for care based on the diagnosis, whereas Critical Access Hospitals are exempt from that and are paid under a cost-based reimbursement system which allows them to collect for the actual cost of care.

Cost-based reimbursement also figures into long-term care at NPVMC. Mincy termed moving the Care Center into the new hospital was a “genius move” and one that especially intrigued him about the project. He said there are different regulations for nursing homes and for hospital-based long-term care, an important one being that it allows for cost-based reimbursement. Long-term care has changed since the Affordable Care Act, he said, and is now based on a “rehab-to-home” model in which patients are given the care they need with a goal to returning them home. Because hospital regulations are less restrictive than those applied to nursing homes, he said it allows a focus on the quality of care. And because the building will be new and the reimbursements higher, he is confident, NPVMC will have no problem attracting patients for these beds.

Mincy is married with four grown children and says that when he learned of the opportunity at NPVMC, he and his wife, Heather agreed it would be the perfect opportunity for him to showcase the skills he’d mastered to be CEO. He said his wife told him that to get her to move out of central Texas would mean they would have to find a very special place to move to. Fortunately, with Saratoga Mincy said, “We hit the jackpot.”