The community hospital in Larned has a new name, a new administrator.
Matthew Heyn, 30, will take over as administrator, effective April 12.
The former St. Joseph Memorial Hospital is now the Pawnee Valley Community Hospital.
Previously, the 25-bed hospital had been owned and managed by Central Kansas Medical Center, one of two hospitals in Great Bend, and its parent company, Denver-based Catholic Health Initiatives.
CKMC last year announced it intended to close the Larned, saying it had lost money for several years. The announcement prompted community leaders and Kansas Attorney General Steve Six to file a lawsuit, accusing CKMC and CHI, both nonprofits, of abandoning a valuable charitable asset.
CKMC and CHI later agreed to sell the hospital to Pawnee County and the City of Larned for $500,000.
The new owners entered a managerial partnership with Hays Medical Center, which plans to expand the hospital’s services.
Prior to accepting the Larned position, Heyn had been chief financial officer at CKMC for two years.
“I am committed to making rural health care work in Pawnee County,” Heyn said. “I’m excited to have the opportunity to work on that in conjunction with Hays Med.”
Heyn grew up in Kerrville, Texas, later earning a bachelor of science degree at the University of Texas-San Antonio, a master’s degree in health care administration at Trinity University, also in San Antonio. He’s held management positions at Rangely District Hospital in Rangely, Colo., and at the Spine Hospital of South Texas, San Antonio.
Heyn, his wife, Melinda, and their infant daughter, Madison, will soon move to Larned.
“Any community the size of Larned – in Kansas and across the nation — needs to have a health care institution that provides quality services and provides as many of those services locally as facility can handle and support,” Heyn said. “It’s my hope, my commitment to reinvent or bring those services back into the Larned health care system.”
That reinvention is already underway.
“In the last month, we’ve expanded pretty much everything,” said Bryce young, chief operating officer at Hays Medical Center. “We’ve purchased just under $90,000 in lab equipment that will allow us to do 80 percent of all the lab right there at Pawnee.
“We’ve re-established the swing bed program,” he said. “We’re in the process of bringing back physical and occupational therapy programs, so we can get back to doing pulmonary and cardiac rehab within the facility. And we’re looking into the possibility bringing in a mobile CAT scan unit.”
Eventually, Young said, plans call for building a new facility.
“That’s the goal – the planning, development and construction of a new facility,” he said. “We’d all like to have a facility that’s more conducive to today’s health care delivery, focusing more on outpatient and ancillary services.”