Dartmouth-Hitchcock CMC Proposed Deal Raises Questions

Alyson Pitman Giles, president and CEO of CMC is really excited.

She says the proposed collaboration between Dartmouth-Hitchcock doctors in Manchester and Bedford and her hospital will mean better care, more efficient care, and more access to care.

TAPE: by working with us so far, they have been able to bring specialists that we could never bring alone to Manchester...sub-specialists in cancer, and neurology and pulmonology....and then we are going to do a liver transplant team. So they’ll get their surgery up north, and they will be cared for in Manchester.

Pitman Giles says at its simplest, the arrangement would bring cutting edge medicine to the largest city in the state.

A similar story has been told before.

About ten years ago, Catholic Medical Center and the Elliot Hospital, proposed merging their two facilities into one hospital called Optima Health.

It, too, was supposed to be the proverbial win-win for the hospitals and the citizens of the greater-Manchester area.

But the arrangement fell apart.

Dr. Steven Paris is the Medical Director of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic in Manchester.

Paris says he believes the deal fell through, in part, because CMC and Elliot didn’t know how to combine to practice modern medicine and adhere to the moral principles directing CMC.

TAPE: They never created a form of an organization where a Catholic hospital and non-sectarian hospital could work together. If they had done that work, then maybe that organization may still be alive today. But I think we have done this.

CMC and Dartmouth have done this by carving certain practices- contraception services and voluntary sterilization- out of the deal.

No one at Dartmouth in Manchester performs abortions; that will not change under the proposal.

Dartmouth's Paris says the ethical directives that guide CMC allow a Catholic institution to work with a secular one provided it doesn’t financially benefit from any forbidden services.

A team of lawyers and Catholic ethicists have combed through CMC and Dartmouth protocols looking for conflicts.

Abortion rights supporters have asked whether the arrangement would limit Dartmouth doctor’s authority when working at CMC’s hospital or their West Side Community Health Center.

CMC President Pitman Giles says when it comes to those doctor’s prescribing contraception there’s a Diocese-approved loophole.

TAPE: a Dartmouth physician in his private practice capacity as a non-affiliated CMC physician can tell the patient, ‘yes, I can prescribe contraception to you, but it’s not as a CMC physician. It’s in my limited private practice, or my practice at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, and it would not be billed for as part of any Catholic Medical Center program.

The kind of question the lawyers and ethicists still have to examine is whether a Dartmouth doctor- at Dartmouth’s Clinic- could prescribe a woman the morning after pill after a rape for example.

An outstanding question like that is why Planned Parenthood’s Dawn Touzin says she wants the Attorney General’s Office to conduct a thorough review.

TAPE: there should be hearings at which the public can participate...and it enables people to fully delve into what this agreement is really about and what it means. And we would look for specific assurances from the Catholic Church there would be no interruption of service.

Some conservative Catholics and pro-life activists also worry whether this deal will undermine their beliefs.

For this so-called collaboration to get approval, the Attorney General’s Office will conduct an anti-trust and a charitable trust review.

Public hearings are scheduled for the fall.

For NHPR News, I’m DG.