Point Roberts hospital district contemplates terminating SuperTrack contract

The Point Roberts hospital district has scheduled a special meeting for 1 p.m. Saturday, June 20 to consider giving notification to SuperTrack Urgent Care, the operators of the local clinic, to terminate their contract at the end of the year. The hospital district has a two-year contract with SuperTrack that will automatically renew for an additional year unless either party gives notice to terminate by June 30, 2020.

According to district superintendent Barb Wayland, the district has “no indication that SuperTrack plans to terminate.”

The issue arose after Deb Shields presented a proposal to operate and manage the clinic to the board of commissioners at its regular monthly meeting on June 9. Shields, a physician’s assistant, was formerly one of the health care providers at the clinic whose departure was apparently abrupt. Commissioner Stephen Falk told Dr. Sean Bozorgzadeh that he was disappointed that Shields was no longer at the clinic. The doctor replied, saying, “Well, so are we. It was quite a surprise to us as well. Barb [Wayland] told me on Saturday. We are quite disappointed as well.” (Clarification: Shields was terminated by SuperTrack after she informed them that she was planning on presenting a proposal to operate the health clinic to the hospital district board of commissioners.)

Bozorgzadeh assured the board that the transition following Shield’s departure would be smooth, saying that the current nurse practitioner, Virginia Lester, has agreed to stay on for at least two weeks. “We have a nurse practitioner, David Shanholzer, who will be working with Virginia and myself. I will be traveling to Point Roberts, you will be seeing more of my face over there,” he said, adding, “The care of the patients will not be hurt in any way, we will continue to take good care of the people and the transition will be smooth.”

In her presentation, Shields told the board that she and her husband, John Shields, who is the assistant fire chief in Point Roberts, had formed Shields Company to operate the clinic. The company board consisted of Bill Meursing, chair, and board members Virginia Lester and Samantha Scholefield. The medical director and supervising physician (as required for a physician’s assistant) would be Dr. Ming Lin.

Lin, one of 32 people included in the district’s Zoom meeting, is an emergency room physician who received widespread attention after calling attention to the state of Covid-19 preparations at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham. He was later terminated by his employer, Teamhealth, which provides emergency room services for the hospital.

Shields offered an extensive preview of the services her company would provide for the community, including a network of collaborating consultants, telemedicine, 24/7 on-call coverage, a financial hardship program and a graduated rate structure, among others.

Afterwards, Falk said that it “was an interesting presentation. The commission would need to consider what would be a bold step which would mean giving six months’ notice to SuperTrack and then would hopefully have bidders including SuperTrack and the Shields Company.”

In the public notice of the special meeting issued by the district on June 10, Wayland outlined the process the district would be required to follow:

“The only way that the district could consider Ms. Shields' proposal would be for the district commissioners to give notice of termination to SuperTrack by the June 30 deadline. If that step were taken, the district commissioners would then publish a request for proposals from any providers interested in operating the clinic. The district commissioners would then select a provider from all proposals submitted. (In 2018 we went through this process after Unity Care terminated their contract. We learned that at that time that no local medical systems were contracting to manage small rural clinics such as ours. SuperTrack was the only organization willing to talk to us and presented the proposal that kept our clinic open.)”

Commissioner Richard Dennis was interested in the capitalization of the newly formed company and wanted to know how it would be able to bridge the gap between offering services and waiting six months or longer before being reimbursed by insurance companies. In response, Shields said that she’d like to defer the answer to his question until the commission had issued a formal request for service at which point she would submit a business plan addressing those concerns. Dennis pressed the question, asking what comfort she could give him and “the community that the Shields Company would have the financial staying power to handle the contract.” Shields said that information would be in the business plan and that she “hesitated to discuss this in an open forum” at an early stage in the process.

The hospital district has issued a call for public comment on the issue of terminating the existing contract in order to “open up the process to consider other providers, including the Shields Company.” In order to avoid a “challenging” Zoom meeting, the district is asking the public to submit their questions, concerns, or issues about the subject by e-mail. These should be submitted by June 17 to superintendent@prphd.org.