Aug. 15, 2024
Each weekday at 9 a.m. sharp, Mick Gibbs flips on a switchboard in the emergency department at Avera Heart Hospital, summons his “old radio DJ voice” and leads his team in a daily prayer.
“Welcome to the heart of the community,” he tells them.
“More and more people every day are convinced we are the ‘heart’ of the community. Many are not leaving to go to Mayo or Minneapolis or Omaha for their care.”
Achieving that distinction has been a classic long and winding road.
When he took over for longtime leader Jon Soderholm seven years ago, Gibbs remembers a statement that still echoes in his ears.
“We will fight any tendency to rest,” he recalls saying shortly after he became the second president in Avera Heart Hospital’s history.
At that time, “I had no earthly idea what I was talking about and did not know what was going to face me in the next seven years.”
In short, those years brought storm after storm. The literal ones, in the form of a tornado, and the professional ones: a pandemic and subsequent financial crisis in health care.
“I certainly anticipated our need to not get comfortable and rest, but I didn’t anticipate how much that philosophy would be tested,” Gibbs said.
The hospital he leads today looks distinctly different from the Avera Heart Hospital of seven years ago. The average age of physicians there has dropped by a decade. There are now more than two dozen of them, up from the middle teens when he arrived. Advanced practice practitioners and physician assistants have grown more than 50 percent.
“And we have stretched farther into our region than I ever imagined,” Gibbs said. “We are providing cardiology to Sioux City, and that was not on my radar.”
Demand for services drives a need for more space.
In the past year, 40 percent more exam rooms were added to the North Central Health Clinic space.
Phase two, slated to be done in a couple of months, expands outpatient prep and recovery bays by 50 percent.
“You’ll come in, you’ll get ready for your cardiac procedure, and you’ll go home the same day,” Gibbs said. “We’re getting better at separating who can go home the same day safely and those who can stay the night, and we’re getting more precise in understanding who is a safe discharge home because it’s actually safer in many ways for people to go home the same day as their procedure.”
In the next six months, a sixth catheterization lab will be added to Avera Heart Hospital, and the relocated Planet Heart headquarters will be finished at 3720 W. 69th St., known as the McHale Building, shared with Avera Home Medical Equipment.
Planet Heart is a cardiac and vascular risk assessment available to most men beginning at age 40 and women at 45. In 45 minutes, patients learn how much calcium is built up in their arteries, get screened for vessel blockage and other vulnerabilities and have a radiologist screen for suspicious spots in the lungs and abdomen.
“We have caught cancer,” Gibbs said. “We found a lung metastasis and caught it before it spread, and he has a high survivability index … and it would have been months or years before he would have had an intervention.”
While Planet Heart has been part of Avera for more than 20 years, the move east on 69th Street “will allow us to grow as the community grows,” Gibbs said. “This is a 20-year plan for capacity.”
That’s the only Planet Heart in Sioux Falls but is one of 22 locations in three state, including several that are franchised, though no money is exchanged.
Overall, the demand for cardiac and vascular services “has skyrocketed,” Gibbs added.
“The team I have the pleasure of serving has exceeded my wildest expectations. We don’t hesitate to show our values, and we are convinced if you want to go far you have to stretch. We didn’t go this far to stay where we are.”
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