HJLR Mar/Apr 2019

Healthcare Journal of little rock I  MAR / APR 2019 13 located around the campus, both indepen- dent physicians and employed physicians. This campus in the middle of Little Rock is its own city in some ways. Big numbers of clinicians attract more clinicians, which attracts patients who then attract more patients. It has a cumulative effect. There is just a lot of activity at our Little Rock cam- pus. The Little Rock hospital is also one of the major employers in the city, along with CHI and UAMS. It is a huge economic engine. According to a study conducted by the University of Arkansas-Little Rock in 2015, Baptist Health’s economic impact adds $841 million to the central Arkansas economy and accounts for 2.2 percent of the gross state product in central Arkansas. Editor Can you discuss some of the part- nerships and affiliations Baptist Health may be working on? Wells We have a joint venture with UAMS on a graduate medical education program that starts this summer. It will begin with family medicine and internal medicine, and then expand over the next few years to other specialties—ultimately providing up to 120 or more new residency opportunities in the state. By working together, Baptist Health and UAMS have dramatically impacted the number of residency spots available in our state, and we know that when physi- cians train in a certain community, they are much more likely to stay there after train- ing is complete. The goal is more physicians for the state, which has a significant short- age, and one way to fix that is to train more doctors in Arkansas. We had an opportu- nity at our North Little Rock campus that we didn’t have anywhere else to do that. We will have a high-quality, community-based resi- dency programwith an academic affiliation that we think is a very attractive model. We have already seen by the number of appli- cants to this program how impactful this can become. We also have a joint-venture Accountable Care Organization with UAMS beginning its second year. It is a program through the Centers for Medicare and Med- icaid Services with 35,000Medicare benefi- ciaries attributable to our physicians, and attracting, retaining, and recruiting health- care professionals? Editor Where does Baptist Health fit into the area landscape? Wells  Baptist Health’s Little Rock hospi- tal campus serves a large percentage of patients in central Arkansas, but it serves just as many people from outside central Arkansas as a referral center for the state. That makes it a little different in terms of where it fits into the landscape. We are a hospital that continues to adopt new tech- nology as quickly as anyone. One example of that is the Mako robotic system for ortho- pedics, and we have always had the latest generation and newest technology with the da Vinci robotic systems. The Little Rock campus is and has always been known as a place for innovation, for adopting new tech- nology, and trying to bring the latest health- care advancements to the people of Arkan- sas. The hospital in Little Rock is also a place where you have an incredibly diverse mix of health-care professionals and services “We are a hospital that continues to adopt new technology as quickly as anyone.”