Filling in the facts about UConn Health

UConn Health is a vibrant academic medical center that is home to highquality patient care, critical research and exceptional teaching. Our clinicians see more than 800,000 patient visits annually, generating $540 million in revenue. Our emergency department saw 36,000 visits this year, and we perform more than 12,500 surgeries and other inpatient procedures annually. Our researchers brought $106 million in outside grants to Connecticut last year alone and their labs are producing important health innovations and breakthroughs. We also welcomed our largest classes ever in the Schools of Medicine and Dental Medicine this year.

One in four of our patients are Medicaid recipients, and we are the single largest provider of dental care to the uninsured and underinsured in the state.

Hearst readers would not know this based on a recent article about UConn Health (“Your Money, Your State: Sixfigure salaries, soaring fringe benefits”), which lacked critical facts and context. We are happy to provide those missing pieces:

In the last six years, clinical patient care revenue at UConn Health has risen by nearly 60 percent, and now accounts for half of our budget. That kind of growth in that amount of time is extraordinary if not unique in health care. Direct state support makes up 23 percent of our budget. The rest is funded by clinical revenues, research grants, contracts, philanthropy and tuition/fees.

This growth in revenue is thanks to new stateofart facilities built through Bioscience Connecticut, strategic marketing and investments, state support and exceptional employees.

The article highlighted salaries. Yet our employee salaries are in line with those elsewhere in health care, including hospitals in Connecticut, based on surveys by the American Association of Medical Colleges and the Medical Group Management Association.

Recruiting and retaining great faculty who contribute to our economic success means paying wages that are competitive. They are the ones seeing patients, performing procedures, applying for research grants and generating revenue. Many physicians, through their clinical practice or research, are able to generate revenue that pays for their own salaries. The highestpaid employees at UConn Health referenced in the piece generated a total of $81 million in clinical and research revenue last year — almost five times the cost of their combined salaries.

But we are not focused on revenue generation alone: since 2014, UConn Health made significant cuts to address the $66.2 million in reduced state support for our budget.

But for the state’s unfunded pension liability, UConn Health would have closed the last year $20 million ahead of budget. That would have been reinvested in the institution, so we could rely less on state support in the future. Instead, the unfunded pension costs contributed to a deficit of more than $50 million.

These costs are the fault of no one generation or part of government. It has been growing over decades and now the cost is driving employee fringe rates sky high. It is not unique to or the fault of UConn Health and we cannot address it on our own.

There is a unique mission and value in our academic medical center: Beyond its contributions to patient care, we are also the largest single provider of medical and dental professionals in Connecticut.

And the external research funding drawn here by UConn Health is a critical economic engine for the state. UConn was ranked ninth in the world in the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. These are the fields that underpin the foundations of genomics and precision medicine, as well as healthrelated data science, two future growth economies of great importance. That means UConn Health is feeding one of the top three economic sectors of the state and fulfilling our promise to energize Connecticut’s economy.

In 2017, the legislature directed us to seek to establish a publicprivate partnership.

The ideal PPP would be designed to create a winwin proposition — one that leverages complementary strengths to bring added value to both partners. Any partnership should strengthen UConn Health, including our academic and research mission, as well as adding value to our operations and expanding our competitiveness. We would have explored this even absent a mandate from the state because it is a logical effort in the current healthcare environment.

We will explore every potential structure that would accomplish the state’s goals, and ours. Each will have their pros and cons and some will be more viable than others, but we must look at every possibility to ensure we have done our due diligence. This exploration continues.

There are many potential outcomes, but no guarantees. In partnership with state government, we will choose the course that makes the most sense for the state, the university, our patients, students and workforce.

The bottom line is that UConn Health is an extremely valuable and highperforming asset for Connecticut and nationally when it comes to research, teaching and patient care. That is the reputation it has earned.

UConn Health is feeding one of the top three economic sectors of the state and fulfilling our promise to energize Connecticut’s economy.

Contributed photo The University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington.