ROBERT PIERCE

   • Leader & Times

At its June 15 regular meeting, the Seward County Commission got a quarterly update on Southwest Medical Center, and CEO Amber Williams said the hospital seems to be trending in an upward direction.

Williams said SWMC is building its days of cash on hand or the number of days the hospital could run if operations ceased immediately. That number is up to 114 days, a figure Williams said is above most hospitals the size of Liberal’s.

“They’re usually running in the 30 to 45 days, so we continue to build on the days of operating cash,” she said. “One thing that is part of the cost reduction plan is through April 2026, we currently have a net income of $115,944.”

This may not seem like much money, but it is a vast improvement, Williams said, over the $1.3 to $1.4 million loss the hospital was seeing in April 2025.

“So we’re working very hard to get things turned around financially,” she said. “We continue to have contract labor in the building in nursing and Diagnostic Imaging, but it is way less.”

SWMC has likewise reduced its number of contract employees, with about 12 in place at this time, with the biggest number coming from Diagnostic Imaging.

Williams said the country is seeing a major shortage of people working in radiology and nuclear medicine, and this will be a focus for now at the local hospital.

One weakness for SWMC, though, is billing.

“We are working on that daily with the outsourced billing company, as well as working on a possible hybrid to get that back in house where we can control it better,” Williams said.

Though it is still a little more than three months away, hospital leaders are already gearing up for the annual Community Health Fair in October.

“It’s not that far away,” Williams said. “It’s a great event for the hospital, a great benefit for our community and the surrounding communities.”

Current recruiting efforts for SWMC are focused on pediatrics and urology, with a secondary focus on a primary care internal medicine physician to help nurse practitioners for advice or questions on care. The hospital is also looking to replace longtime OBGYN Dr. Dennis Knudsen.

“He’s a superstar, but at some point, he has got to want to retire,” Williams said.

One orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Firas Kawtharani, recently took a job with another hospital, saying it was an opportunity he felt was best for his family.

“He feels now’s the time,” Williams said. “He’s been here eight years, and he’s ready to go on to a new opportunity.”

Another orthopedic surgeon, however, should be returning to Liberal soon. Williams said hospital leadership had a good site visit recently with Dr. Suhail Ansari, and she said the doctor feels ready to come back to Southwest Kansas, where he calls home.

The SWMC Board of Trustees and administration team have been also working on a strategic plan. Williams said this is being led by board chairman Dennis Sander, who is hoping to have plan polished soon to put on the hospital’s Web site and pushed out to the community.

The hospital is likewise taking part in President Trump’s Rural Health Transformation  Plan, which will bring $50 billion to rural health care facilities over the next five years.

“The hospital was chosen as an anchor hospital,” Williams said. “To put that in the simplest terms, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid picked 10 hospitals in Kansas to be what they call an anchor hospital – a hospital that will work with other smaller community hospitals and critical access hospitals in our area to keep patients closer to home.”

Williams said there are 24 tracks to the Trump program, and while SWMC applied for it with Meade’s Artesian Valley Health System, Williams said the Liberal hospital did not get a collaboration to bring in certain specialists and have the cost shared between hospitals.

“For instance, we put a proposal in to bring a urologist,” Williams said. “The hospital would pay part of the person’s salary. So would Meade, so would Satanta, and the urologist would go and do clinics at every single one.”

As part of the anchor hospital program, Williams said SWMC will benefit from other things such as remote patient monitoring, a fairly new concept.

“It will allow us to put a patient monitor on a person who is remotely  tracked to let us know from the patient’s information that’s tracked at another site,” she said. “That should help with the care. The first year, it’s just inpatient, but by year two and three, we’ll be able to send home on a patient in the clinic if they would like to track their statistics for a while and see how they do at home.”

Williams estimated about 4,000 things remote patient monitoring can track, and for now, SWMC will be using a monitoring site in Nashville, Tenn., as Via Christi St. Francis uses the monitor at this time.

“We would like to create a jobs  center in Kansas with jobs for people in Kansas who are closer to do that remote monitoring,” she said. “They’ll just call and say the patient is showing respiratory deterioration far before you’ll see it as a nurse going on your round and getting that patient help a little quicker.”

Williams said other talks have centered around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the hospital and patient clinic rooms.

“You have AI up in the corner, and I go see the doctor, and it automatically scribes my visit,” she said. “Then it flows right into my chart so the doctor doesn’t have to dictate anymore. They just have to look and scrub and make sure there’s nothing that doesn’t make sense, spelled wrong, misinterpreted,”

Another area the hospital is working on is reporting essential information such as for stroke and diabetes cases. Williams said SWMC and one of its clinics can benefit from this.

“Some of them, we will have to put in to collect as we see patients. We don’t currently track that information, but we will have it all ready to go and ready to report in order to obtain those dollars,” she said.

Lastly, the hospital’s longtime chief nursing officer, Sandy Cain, will retire at the end of June after more than 30 years at SWMC.

“We are currently taking applications for review, and we’ll start interviewing to fill her shoes,” Williams said.

Williams added the University of Kansas is looking to open 180 additional rural medicine physician spots in Lawrence, Salina and Wichita, as well as the doctor of optometry program in Wichita in the next five years.

“For those people to get in there, it’s paid for, but they have to sign a five-year contract they will work in a rural community once they get done with school,” she said. “That will be in family medicine, psychiatric, gynecology and orthopedics.”

Williams briefly touched on her work with critical access hospitals in the area.

“Send your patients to us if they’re too much of an acuity for you take care of,” she said. “Let us get them back and send them back to you because a critical access hospital makes money in their swing beds. You would send those back to the swing beds, and that’s where those critical access hospitals would benefit. Get these hospitals to work together because it’s a proven fact if you take care of your patients closer to home and they don’t have to be sent to Wichita, you don’t have a family worrying about finding a place to stay and paying for food and paying for gas back and forth.”