HJAR Jul/Aug 2026

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS I  JUL / AUG 2026 13 Barnes Sure. And don’t get me wrong: Sometimes cuts have to happen. Lucas Campbell, the new CEO at Washington Regional, came in and inherited a tough financial situation. He really had very little option at that stage because things had to change quickly. Growth can’t change things quickly, so the only thing you can do at that stage is an expense reduction — just like has been done here in the past. But my thought is, if I can grow things appropriately, we can better meet our financial obligations. Healthcare margins are very low right now and if you have a margin of 2%, you’re doing really well. Unlike most healthcare organizations in our state, UAMS doesn’t just take care of patients. We have two very, very impor- tant missions in addition to that. Those are research and education. Neither one of those pay for themselves. We have to be able to do that with our clinical enterprise. These are not losses. These are true missions. They are who we are and what makes us different for our state. It’s important that we’re able to fund them appropriately so that we can grow them too. We can’t charge students what it costs us to educate them because they can’t afford to pay that much. So we have to supplement it with other revenues and those revenues come from our clini- cal enterprise. If we’re bigger, it’s 2% of a much larger number, which gives us a bet- ter chance to fund those other things. Editor When healthcare dollars are limited, how do you decide what must be protected? Barnes Great question. It’s a challenge for every leader in healthcare now. One thing I want to protect is our greatest resource, which is our employees. We have done things to try to take care of them. You may have seen that we are in the black now and one of the first things we did when we got in the black, meaning that we were actually not losing money like we were — we had lost $100 million in three years kidding you. I found out about the Proton Center and the challenges there a few days after I became interim and it’s one thing that I’ve thought about every day since I was interim chancellor. It is a significant challenge. It was a tough business model when it was set up and we are working through the challenges of that business model. It is tough. We had to send a letter — demand letter — because we have not been paid. We’ve not been paid our rent for many, many months, close to $3 million worth of rent, maybe more than that now, but we also have not been reimbursed for our employ- ees or our physician coverage. We’ve got- ten behind on those. Our demand letter was related to those two. It is very important that a healthcare entity working with another healthcare care entity — because this is a joint venture — is being reimbursed for the healthcare services they provide. We had to send that demand letter. We still have a breach there. We’re not caught up yet. So we made some changes . . . that hit the news and announced that we wouldn’t continue under our current situation, but we’re still taking care of patients. We’re treating all the patients who are currently being treated. And as far as new patients, there is a process that allows approval for new patients. We treat a lot of children. Unfortunately, too many children have can- cer and too many require incredibly special service that Proton can deliver. And we’re committed to continuing that for them and for others for whom proton is really a significant difference maker in their care. We’re committed to doing this as long as we can. Although it means that we have more employees right now than we can actually utilize. If our volume gets cut any lower, we’re committed to protecting our employees for as long as we can in that situation also. We hope that we work out a business arrangement going forward that allows us to continue proton treatment in a very strong way for Arkansans. It’s important to clinical care. It’s — is we committed to raise our lowest paid employees a dollar an hour so that our lowest paid employees now make $16 an hour. Obviously, that affected other employ- ees between $15 and $16 an hour as well. That was at a cost of four-and-a-half million dollars — not an insignificant cost but very important to our folks. And we very much believe that we need to be able to pay our employees at a rate which allows them to take care of their families as well. So we’ll continue to make those changes when we can. We know that because margins have been so difficult and we’ve struggled finan- cially, we, like many of the healthcare pro- viders, have folks who are paid belowmar- ket in areas. And we’ll do what we can, as soon as we can, to get our employees paid at the rate they should be paid. None of us get paid as much as we think we’re worth, but we certainly want to be paying market rates and we’ll work hard to do that. And then, as far as service lines and where you put your emphasis, all hospitals choose a few areas. Obviously, we choose many more because of what we do, but any hospital will probably tell you — just as the new CEO Matt Fry in Northwest Arkansas has said he wants to build oncology, car- diovascular, and orthopedics. And most any healthcare CEO would tell you the same things because those are high profile spe- cialties and they drive revenues. UAMS is much different. We commit resources to every specialty in medicine and every sub- specialty in medicine because we’re training residents and fellows in those specialties. So it’s important that we remember that our other missions, like education, impact what we do clinically also because it’s important for us to train the workforce for our state. Editor T he Proton Center has been in the news for nonpayments to UAMS. Has this been resolved? Barnes Proton Center. I don’t think I know what you’re talking about. Obviously, I’m