WakeMed and Duke Health launch heart partnership

Regional health care giants Duke Health and WakeMed Health & Hospitals will launch a combined heart service in Wake County that will enable sharing of each others’ patients, doctors and facilities.

The hospitals’ announcement on Tuesday comes less than a month before the scheduled opening of rival UNC Rex Healthcare’s 8-story Heart & Vascular Hospital in Raleigh.

Duke and WakeMed began discussions on how to collaborate in Wake County in 2014, the same year that Rex began construction on its $235 million cardiovascular tower.

In an interview Tuesday, WakeMed CEO Donald Gintzig said Duke and WakeMed would next announce a collaboration around oncology.

Cardiology and cancer are two of the most lucrative medical services offered by hospital networks and their teams of doctors. Hospital systems compete fiercely for the high-yield doctors, sometimes luring them away from rivals with generous contracts and promises of new facilities and state-of-the-art technology. Several years ago WakeMed lost about two dozen heart specialists when the doctors agreed to work for Rex, representing a loss of millions of dollars in revenue for WakeMed.

On a conference call Tuesday to make the announcement, Duke and WakeMed officials offered scant details about their collaboration. They have yet to determine how exactly they will work together and whether they will hire new doctors or staff. The transition and implementation begin March 1 and will take shape in the coming months.

“One of the benefits of this collaboration is we can take advantage of each others’ facilities,” said William Fulkerson Jr., executive vice-president of the Duke University Health System. “In the facilities and clinics and hospitals we each have in Wake County today it creates an opportunity for the physicians at Duke and at WakeMed to work together, side-by-side in many cases, to really combine their expertise in a way that is truly advantageous for patients.”

The two partners emphasized that their collaboration is not a joint venture or a merger of assets. But the project will operate under a new legal name – Heart Care Plus+ – even though patients will continue visiting Duke or WakeMed branded doctors and facilities.

For Duke, the partnership opens up access to WakeMed’s considerable patient base in Wake County. WakeMed has more than 65 entry points into its network here – either through doctors, clinics or outpatient facilities or clinics.

“One of the beauties of this is WakeMed has terrific locations and clinics ringed around Raleigh,” Fulkerson said.

For WakeMed, the partnership means that several thousand patients a year with advanced heart conditions – that require transplants or aortic surgeries – will continue to receive treatment without leaving the WakeMed network. Gintzig didn’t provide a historic number of such patients but said “it’s more than you think.”

The partnership will also give WakeMed patients access to Duke clinical trials testing experimental procedures and treatments.

Duke and WakeMed will share revenues from the patients under a confidential financial formula. The boards of both organizations unanimously approved creating a combined single heart service, Fulkerson and Gintzig said.

However, even with the cardiology combination, Wake County still does not offer heart transplant operations, which are performed by Duke in Durham and UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill. But the combination does mark an intensification of competition among longstanding rivals.

Rex’s new cardiovascular tower, scheduled to open March 5, will consolidate procedures that now take place in eight different sections of the main hospital.

“This region’s aging and growing population means that there is increasing demand for heart care,” said Rex spokesman Alan Wolf. “There is also an opportunity to provide more prevention services and education about heart-healthy diet and lifestyle choices that can keep patients out of the hospital.”

WakeMed’s nearly 80 heart specialists performed nearly 20,000 procedures at the flagship hospital in Raleigh and nearly 800 at the Cary hospital in the 2016 fiscal year. Duke has about 180 heart specialists and residents on staff.

Combining those operations means than neither business partner has to take out loans to build a new facility in order to expand its reach.

“At the end of the day, it’s not about buildings,” Gintzig said. “I’ll be honest, building buildings doesn’t improve heart care.”

This story was originally published February 14, 2017 at 1:25 PM with the headline "WakeMed and Duke Health launch heart partnership."