When Michael Clark came to the area five and a half years ago as the CEO of Logan Memorial Hospital, his goal above all others was to put the hospital on sound footing.

"There was a different concept, in which we had started breaking services out of the hospital and moving them to Bowling Green, and that was something that doesn't fit a community hospital," he said. "That became our focus. My first order of business was to bring these services back to make this a fully functioning hospital."

Those services are back and now Clark wants the public to know that not only can the hospital now do more for it's patients, it can also do it better.

"We need the community to recognize that we can provide excellent care here and often even better compassionate care here. Our closeness and our small size should help us realize that these are our friends and our families that our coming through these doors who give us the trust to provide for them," Clark said. "And that is our key. We have excellent satisfaction surveys of those who have used our services."

One by one, he said, "we are winning them over."

Not the old hospital

Clark looks over plans, a master plan he calls it, to a $5 million expansion that is set to begin in May or June of 2003 and says that he wants the first thing people to see is the change that has gone on at the hospital.

"They will see a newly renovated facility in large part. They will see new wall coverings. A clean, crisp, professional image," he said. "Our first focus in doing our expansion and renovation was to cover the patient care areas, all the patient rooms and all the public corridors.

"Now we purposely have not renovated some of the areas such as surgery and x-ray, because those will be completely redesigned and rebuilt. It made no sense to change the finish of those areas. That will come with the master plan.

"We will be adding new touches, new things. We've got a patient education channel that we will be introducing in January. The patients will have an additional channel where they can view health-related matters from diet, smoking cessation-- even particulars to their illnesses."

Clark said that the hospital is now equipped to start treatment of any illness at the hospital.

"People in this area have the longest memories of anyone I've ever come across," he said. "And they will often relay a story about something in the old hospital. We are not the old hospital.

"We are as modern and as up to date and even more advanced than many facilities of like size across the country," Clark said. "We had a commitment to bringing in the best of technologies. There is no illness that you couldn't start treating from here. We don't do brain surgery here, but we could diagnose that and have diagnosed it and see that those patients go to a place were they will get that additional specialized service that needs such a large population to support."

The master plan

It all started about nine months ago with a master plan.

"We spent a good nine months with architects and planners coming in and accessing what physical viability we had and what our future needs would be as far as population growth, services... from that came a master planning concept that will expand the building and or renovate it. We will be wrapping around our building with about a $5 million expansion."

Clark said the hospital has taken that concept and now has an architect who is refining those plans and is 90 percent finished so the construction can start next spring.

"But we are already doing things. Last week we kicked off the renovation of Obstetrics," he said. "That is just one piece of the master plan and we went ahead and addressed that this year."

And that master plan is built on the success of the past year five years.

The hospital, by looking for ways to improve services, has added a Pulmonary Rehabilitation program for those suffering from breathing related illnesses; a full-time orthopedic service; and a Millennium MG/MC nuclear imaging equipment. Meanwhile the medical staff has doubled in past three years.

"Shortly after I arrived at Logan Memorial we became part of LifePoint," Clark said. LifePoint is a collection of rural hospitals that was spun off of HCA. "It's important in my mind that we had hospitals that serve similar communities but are focused on the local hospital. From our corporate hiearchy all the way down to every employee of the hospital, the focus is on the community.

"There is no mandate sent down from Nashville that directs. Each community is supposed to access their own needs and then build their plans accordingly. We rely heavily on a local board of trustees. They are a very fine group and also has medical staff members on the board. That helps guide the future of the hospital."

Needs of the patients

At the end of 1999 the hospital started focusing on meeting the needs of the patients in the community, Clark said.

"We wanted it to where they wouldn't have to leave the community to receive high-quality health care. We focused on getting our own employees in tune with what we were doing and getting them trained and making sure that we attracted the best and the brightest."

Part of that training, Clark said, was focusing on guest excellence.

"We really do think of our patients as our guests," he said. "After all, they are our only reason to be in business."

Clark said that once the hospital kind of solidified things within its organization, the hospital started recruiting and attracting highly-skilled, qualified physicians.

"We spent a lot of time educating them about our community," he said. "Some of them are not from Kentucky and some of them are not even from the United States originally. We spent a lot of time showing them the community. Letting them get to know us and us to know them and from that point we have made some excellent selections in recruitment."

Clark said in the recruitment of physicians the hospital tried to recruit not only primary care doctors but those in speciality care.

"Othopedics itself was at least two years of effort before we matched with the right physician who was perfect for us, and we were perfect for him," he said. "We've gotten the people contingent together and now we are going to expand to building the service contingent to meet the needs of those people better."

The change in the hospital has been a team effort, Clark said.

"I guess most of all, we are extremely proud of our staff. Not only our employees but our medical staff," he said. "It was pretty easy to physicians to come into our community to join our physicians. They liked having the peers here that had seen it before and the experience that they could draw upon. As the physicians that have been here have really helped the new physicians, particularly the specialists."

In the community

Outside the facility itself, Clark said he wants the hospital to be a presence for the public to depend on.

"We've not only done things within the community. We've done a lot presentations to schools, health fairs both for the public and for industry," he said. "And we are also very proud of our outreach into Todd County. We have doubled the size of our physician office there. And some of the screenings provided there have really opened up some health avenues that may not been available to that community before."

While the hospital doesn't have any other free-standing clinic -- the other clinics are on campus-- Clark wants people to know that the hospital wants to reach out to the area even more in the future.

"We are considering some long-range plans to bring our services into Auburn, that's an area that I see growing and the population shifting, and we are pretty much on the front-end of that. We also support the clinic in Lewisburg."