University of Kentucky will not build hospital in southeast Lexington, state lawmakers hear (2024)

FRANKFORT — The University of Kentucky will not build a hospital in southeast Lexington because it wants to do what its network of rural hospital partners want: focus on its mission as a top-level care facility for the sickest patients, a UK vice president told a legislative subcommittee Wednesday.

The proposed Hamburg-area hospital “was perceived as us stepping outside of our swim lane” by the university’s clinical affiliates out in the state, Senior Vice President for Health and Public Policy Mark Birdwhistell told the Budget Review Subcommittee on Health and Family Services.

“We heard loud and clear, ‘We want UK HealthCare to focus on taking care of the sickest of the sick. We don’t want UK out doing primary care and secondary care.’ . . . That was very eye-opening.”

Birdwhistell reiterated, “The message we received loud and clear from our clinical affiliates was, ‘When our folks get that sick, we want them to come to UK. We want them on campus. We don’t them in a community hospital.'”

UK was in the planning process for a new hospital at the southern junction of Interstates 75 and 64, and had bought the property and done some initial work. Instead of a hospital, Birdwhistell said after the meeting, UK will build a clinic with specialty services like the one it has built in a former department store in the Turfland Center in southwest Lexington, but larger: “Turfland plus.”

The university will also build other clinics to serve its employees in Lexington and the Bluegrass region, many of whom are “having to get health care outside the system,” Birdwhistell told legislators. “We feel like that is our obligation.”

Birdwhistell was speaking to the subcommittee in a new role, which he said will include centralizing the university’s “government-relations activities across campus,” including “building a better partnership with the General Assembly. I felt I was uniquely positioned to do that.”

Previously, Birdwhistell was UK HealthCare’s vice president for health system administration and chief of staff. He was secretary of the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services under Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher, and helped Republican Gov. Matt Bevin propose changes to the federal-state Medicaid program, which he had run before becoming cabinet secretary. He appeared with Angela Dearinger, executive vice dean of the UK College of Medicine, who was briefly health secretary at the end of Bevin’s term.

The General Assembly is firmly controlled by Republicans. In the recent legislative session, Birdwhistell was the university’s point man in changing legislation that helped Pikeville Medical Center and some other rural trauma hospitals but in its original form would have reduced some of the extra Medcaid payments that UK gets for being a “safety net” hospital.

That relates to UK’s recent takeover of other hospitals in Ashland and Morehead, which Birdwhistell discussed at Wednesday’s legislative subcommittee meeting. Speaking of UK’s absorption of King’s Daughters Medical Center in Ashland, he said “Where we failed . . . is when you put that UK brand in front of that name, that brings with it an expectation of service, not predator,” which he said was the perception of some.

“And so, we’re readjusting a lot of the narratives to say, ‘When you have UK in front of your name, you go to a partner and say, ‘What can we do to help you be successful?’ It’s not ‘What do we do to crush you?’ And this is community health care. This is not our forte, so we’ve learned that lesson. . . . We can grow the workforce for those providers and not have to do it ourselves.”

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