By Ronald Winters, co-founder and Principal of Gibbins Advisors, the Independent Monitor

Our firm, Gibbins Advisors, is the Independent Monitor appointed in connection with HCA’s acquisition of the assets and healthcare operations of Mission Health.  I am responsible for this engagement.  I am writing this to further update the Mission Health communities on our progress.  As described below, since beginning this work in October 2019, we met or otherwise heard from a significant volume of community members who voiced comments and questions.  We are grateful to everyone for the feedback.

Overview of Community Meetings:

We have now completed the in-person community engagement meetings for all the Mission Health hospitals, and in total we estimate more than 600 people attended those meetings.

At each meeting we made a presentation explaining:

1. A summary of HCA’s forward-looking commitments under the scope of the Independent Monitor;

2. Our role as Independent Monitor, the role of six Advisory Boards of each of the hospitals and the role of the Seller entity (ultimately Dogwood Health Trust in mid-2020).

We spent most of the time listening to the community and gaining insight from local people about their experiences and concerns. Additionally, we explained that at this juncture our role is principally to monitor compliance with the 15 commitments HCA agreed to that fall within our scope. We emphasized that the Independent Monitor is not involved in resolving individual or group concerns or grievances, but to the extent those comments are indicative of compliance issues that fall within our scope, they will be used in our evaluation process.  Whether or not concerns voiced relate to the HCA commitments within our scope, we are logging the information and channeling to HCA on an anonymized basis.

The content of our presentation at the community meetings and other useful information (including directions on how to contact us) is on our website www.independentmonitorMHS.com found within the useful links and information tab.

Next Steps in Monitoring HCA’s Compliance with its 15 Commitments:

In addition to the community meetings, we have received community feedback by email, phone, meetings with local interested groups and submissions from the portal on our website: www.independentmonitorMHS.com or through our email independentmonitor@gibbinsadvisors.com.

We’d like to reassure you that if you’d like to submit anonymously, you can do so and forego sharing your name or information on our contact form. We are logging the information from all sources, evaluating concerns and will share with HCA as well as Dogwood Health Trust as it prepares for the role of enforcing compliance.

We are engaging in a regular dialogue with HCA regarding compliance matters and will be requesting information from them based upon we have learned thus far. We expect a report on compliance from HCA by the end of April 2020 which will then commence a timetable regarding compliance discussions. Pursuant to the prescribed timetable, we expect to be back in each of the communities again to conduct hospital site visits before the end of June this year.

Keep updated on our activities:

We’d like to thank everyone who has attended our meetings and reached out to us for taking the time share their perspective and information.

Please continue to do so and refer to our website www.independentmonitorMHS.com to stay updated on our progress and to access more information about our important work as Independent Monitor.