Springfield Daily Citizen: Children's Mercy KC to see patients at Mercy Springfield in 2024
By Ryan Collins
The collaboration effort between Mercy Springfield Communities and Children’s Mercy Kansas City (CMKC) to enhance pediatric care in southwest Missouri is moving at a fast pace, and the Kansas City-based hospital will begin seeing patients in southwest Missouri within the coming months.
“We expect to have patients being seen (in Springfield) this calendar year,” Dr. Rob Steele, executive vice president and chief strategy and innovation officer at CMKC, said in a May 29 interview on Mercy’s Springfield campus. “We’re itchy because we’re still in the midst of recruiting, but you know, optimistically, this is within the next couple months.”
The collaboration between the two hospital systems will not be a joint venture, nor a profit-sharing model, said John Myers, president of Mercy Springfield Communities. Instead, CMKC will pay Mercy to lease space within Mercy’s existing facilities, but CMKC will operate independently and without oversight from Mercy. The physicians and staff of the new Springfield pediatric practice will be exclusively employed by CMKC.
The model the two systems are aiming for is called a “hospital in a hospital,” but that type of operation still has to be approved by regulators, Myers said. The amount of square feet that CMKC will lease and the cost is still being hashed out, but it will be a significant quantity of space.
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