RMCH sells its dialysis operation

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — For more than 20 years, residents of this area relied on the doctors at Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital to provide dialysis care.

But come this fall, the hospital will be turning over that responsibility to a private company being formed by local doctors.

“This is a win-win situation,” said Chuck Wright, the hospital’s CEO who headed a news conference in the hospital’s library Thursday to announce the changeover.

It’s a win situation for the hospital, he said, because it turns over the billing for the dialysis services to the new company, which will be called Red Rock Dialysis.

Wright pointed out that the hospital has been experiencing problems in its billing services for years and billing for dialysis services is a complicated procedure.

The doctors, headed by Dr. James Whitfield and Dr. Oladipo Adeniyi, both of whom are nephrologists and have treated kidney diseases here for years, have also agreed to buy out the hospital’s dialysis operation.

Wright said the value of the hospital’s operation is still being appraised, but he estimated that the hospital will receive $1.5 million and up.

It’s a win situation for the doctors, he said, because it will end some of the “frustrations” they have felt with the current operations.

“We will benefit financially from this,” he said. “They will benefit financially from this as well.”

He pointed out that contracting out dialysis services is the norm in the United States, with very few hospitals running their own operations, and those that do are “dwindling every year” because it is such a specialized type of service.

When the new company goes in operation this fall, it will be associated with Renal Services of America, a company out of Long Beach, Calif., which has operations in several states, including Ohio, Wyoming, Texas, Oregon, California and the territory of Guam.

Larry Jones, the CEO of Renal Services of America, who was at the news conference, said this was the first time his company will be operating in New Mexico.

Both he and Wright stressed that the changeover will not affect the patients in this area. They will be going to the same doctors and the staff that has been working with them will probably be going over to the new company as well.

Jones pointed out that the doctors won’t be charging any more since most of the patients are paid through Medicare or Medicaid and the federal government has a fixed rate for those kinds of services.

Whitfield added that one of he reasons the local doctors chose to be associated with Renal Services rather than one of the larger companies was that this arrangement will allow control of the company to be handled locally so that doctors here can determine what is in the best interests of the local community.