.jpg)
Today we heard from Laura Keithahn, Operations Executive at St. John's Hospital in Maplewood. Laura has a clinical background in Radiology. She later went on to earn on MBA and became involved in hospital management with the Health East hospital system in the Twin Cities. St. John's opened in 1911 in a downtown St. Paul location, moving in 1985 to Maplewood. It was the first hospital in the Twin Cities to offer private rooms for all patients. It currently serves over 100 patients per day in its emergency room operations. It also handles 7,000 surgeries and 3,000 births per year. Laura went on to discuss the recent merger between the Health East and Fairview Healthcare systems. The newly combined organization has 32,000 employees, 11 hospitals, 56 primary care clinics, 55 specialty clinics and 54 senior living facilities. She is enthusiastic about this merger, saying that it will enable the organization to manage through the challenging trends in today's healthcare market, which include a downward trend in reimbursement, higher percentage of medicare/medicaid patients, finding ways to pay for advances in medical technology, as well as the need to upgrade and update IT technology platforms.