Community Hospital

Public access to public corporations is essential, so the recent changes at Eastern Maine Healthcare are a positive sign. But it is important to remember that they are just a means to improved health care for the region, not the improvement itself.

Earlier this week, Norman Ledwin said he will step down as president and chief executive officer of Eastern Maine Medical Center, but will remain as CEO of Eastern Maine Healthcare, the hospital’s parent corporation. That plan apparently was being contemplated long before EMH’s annual meeting of incorporators, which expanded the organization’s board by electing a slate of candidates put forward by physicians and community members.

Mr. Ledwin, who has overseen both remarkable growth and unusual levels of conflict with doctors through his 10 years as CEO of the hospital, will now focus on EMH’s seven-hospital system, with an aim toward bringing efficiencies, such as EMH did recently when its hospitals adopted a single policy in the complex area of patient restraint. The accumulation of systemwide changes should reduce costs while improving care; a new CEO may give the hospital a fresh start with the public and area physicians.

The message from incorporators was abundantly clear: They perceived the current boards were unresponsive to the public and insisted its actions become transparent. Support for the Good Governance candidates – attorney M. Ray Bradford Jr. and physician Dennis Shubert for the EMH board and state Sen. Mary Cathcart and nonprofit board veteran Elizabeth Warren for the hospital board – was strong, and the vote totals would have changed the EMH board considerably had the board not quickly decided to expand itself. Elizabeth Warren is the wife of BDN Publisher Richard J. Warren.

As encouraging as these changes are, they will have meaning only if the result is better care. Maine is undergoing an overhaul of its health care system through Gov. Baldacci’s Dirigo reforms, badly needed because, as a study released this week from Governing magazine and the Pew Charitable Trusts concludes, lack of affordability has left states with “first-rate medicine and a third-rate health care system.”

EMH and EMMC are crucial to the well-being of this region. Giving the public a better sense of how these institutions are performing is likely to enhance care for everyone.