Gritman, Moscow Family Medicine join forces

Gritman Medical Center and Moscow Family Medicine will officially integrate their health care services on the Palouse starting Saturday.

"Because of our rapidly changing health care environment, it is very common where physicians and hospitals are coming together, and it was time to do that here in our community," Gritman Medical Center President and CEO Kara Besst said.

Besst said the two entities have worked collaboratively to provide health care to the area for decades.

She said Gritman will work jointly with Moscow Family Medicine to operate its Moscow clinics, including the main clinic on Main Street, the MFM West Side Clinic, MFM Quick Care and the University of Idaho Student Health campus clinic.

MFM has been a part of Catalyst Medical Group, which also includes Valley Medical Center in Lewiston and Clarkston and Lewiston Orthopaedic Associates, since 2017.

MFM declared April 25 its intention to leave Catalyst Medical Group before the end of the year.

Gritman Community Relations and Marketing Director Peter Mundt said patients will see some visible changes as a result of the integration, such as different signage and branding on the interior and exterior of clinics and on medical forms.

But, Mundt said, patients will still be able to see their same doctors and other staff and the process of scheduling appointments will not change.

Besst said the integration provides Gritman and MFM with a "deeper bench."

"With this integration, we'll have about 650 employees between the two organizations coming together to help provide that care," Besst said. "It allows us to really look at other services that we can either add in or recruit to our community."

MFM CEO Jeff Geier said he anticipates the integration will help attract and retain more high quality family medicine physicians to the two health care organizations.

"There is a continuing and, in fact, growing shortage of family medicine physicians in our country, and actually Idaho ranks near the bottom in number of physicians per capita in the country," Geier said.

He said combining services provides a greater critical mass and leverage in recruiting physicians and retaining those they already have.

Besst said she expects some of those recruits to come from the University of Idaho WWAMI Medical Education Program, a program the hospital and MFM work with, because the integration will allow Gritman and MFM to share their mission with those WWAMI students.

She said the two entities will work to recruit those students, who study in the WWAMI program for about 18 months before moving on to their residency program, back to Latah County.

Besst said they already have efforts in place to identify those students and work with them while they attend the WWAMI program. The next step would be to work to recruit them to work at Gritman/MFM clinics when they finish their residency.

Garrett Cabeza can be reached at (208) 883-4631, or by email to gcabeza@dnews.com.