The Regional Medical Center will provide an acre of land on Hutto Road for the location of a farmer’s market.

The market would aim to provide hospital employees, as well as the greater community, access to fresh fruits and vegetables in line with the hospital’s mission to “enhance patient care.”

The market will be open on Tuesdays from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. from June 17 to the end of October.

Details, including the number of farmers who will participate, are still being worked out.

Hospital trustees gave unanimous approval to providing land for the farmer’s market during their Tuesday meeting. The hospital would be responsible for providing the location and assisting with internal marketing and health promotion, RMC Vice President Brenda Williams said.

“We are very excited about it,” she said.

The S.C. Department of Agriculture, in conjunction with RMC Trustee Dr. Oscar Butler, approached hospital management late last year about the possibility of a farmers market on its site.

The market plan is based on the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center farmer’s market in Oakland, Calif. and is part of a general trend across the nation of hospitals promoting healthy habits through on-site farmer’s markets.

The Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. has a market, as well as other hospitals in Iowa, Oregon and Colorado, to name a few states.

The market would be a partnership of the S.C. Department of Agriculture, Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College and the Orangeburg County Farmer’s Market.

“We are just testing the waters out there and see what comes of it,” said Molly Smith, Orangeburg County Farmer’s Market manager. “We are really promoting healthy eating. Healthy eating is such a big thing nowadays.”

In addition, Smith said with rising gasoline and food prices, the local farmer’s market is intended to eliminate the middle man and to cut down on transportation costs.

Smith said while the U.S. 601 market is a test, there are hopes for bigger and better things in the future.

“We would love to have a full-time market out there,” she said.

In the meantime, the OCFM is still going forward with its plans to construct a brand-new, 6,000-square-foot market on U.S. 301. The new market would include stall space for about 24 vendors.

Board procedures



Also during Tuesday’s meeting, Trustee Betty Henderson expressed concerns about not being informed of a recent hospital-paid trip to Missouri to view information technology vendor Cerner Corporation’s operation.

In April, trustees voted 8 to 4, with one abstention, to contract with Cerner to provide an integrated system for the hospital’s IT functions.

Henderson, who sits on the hospital’s Information Technology Committee, said as a member of the committee she should have been informed about the trip whether or not she went.

“I think that was very unfair,” she said. “I would have liked to have had the courtesy to have known that it was taking place.”

IT Committee Chairman Milton Dufford apologized to Henderson for not informing her, noting that the trip was set up at the last minute by hospital management and was not intended to exclude anyone. The total cost of the trip for the five-member hospital team was $3,000.

“I just have a problem with the way we do business,” Henderson said. “How we exclude and include who we want to.”

Dufford was joined by board Vice Chairman Dr. Carl Carpenter and Dr. John Hutto and two other hospital employees on the trip to see the capabilities of Cerner and its operations.

Dufford said the trip confirmed to him that the company and operation are well-run and secure. The group stayed about four hours at Cerner.

Also, RMC President Tom Dandridge issued an apology for his failure to contact the press related to a called May 13 board meeting about a medical staff issue. Dandridge said the meeting was called under a lot of uncertainties and that the failure to provide adequate public notice was an oversight.

Some of the trustees have expressed concerns about the hospital’s public disclosure procedures.

Money matters



Trustee Danny Covington repeated his concerns about the data provided by RMC’s financial

consultant KaufmanHall during the April board meeting about the “perceived” negative impact on the hospital’s days-cash-on-hand if the hospital paid off its debt from 1998.

Covington has often expressed a desire for the hospital board to consider the possibility of paying off the $17.7 million outstanding bond.

In 1998, the hospital issued a $30 million variable-rate demand bond through Ambac Assurance, but Ambac’s credit rating was downgraded by Fitch, prompting bond purchasers to get cold feet. KaufmanHall has encouraged the hospital to seek a letter of credit that would wrap around the current bond, which would use a bank’s credit rating for better backing of the bond.

“This is theater,” Covington said, pointing to a graph provided by KaufmanHall on its projections of the hospital’s days-cash-on-hand. “When I look at this graph, there are just too many things that are a mystery to me.”

Kaufman Hall says days-cash-on-hand, one indicator of a hospital’s financial strength looked at by crediting agencies, would fall down to about 110 days from the current level if the bond is paid off.

Paying off the bond, KaufmanHall says, will take the hospital below a BBB rating and it would take four years to get back to a BBB and seven years to get back to where the hospital is today.

Covington has said, according to his calculations, paying off the 1998 bond would leave the hospital below a BBB rating for a short time before cash would begin to quickly build, improving the days-cash-on-hand figures to a BBB level by year’s end or at the latest within the next two years.

Covington contends KaufmanHall’s projections are consistently inaccurate, which “raises red flags” about their advice.

Chief Financial Officer Dean Turner, in defense of KaufmanHall, said the projections are based on the best analysis of where the hospital currently stands and where it will stand in the future.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is what we are doing today and what it will look like and if we did what we should do, what will it look like,” Turner said. “And will this affect us positively or negatively.”

In other business, Trustees unanimously approved donating $50,000 over the next five years to the Columbia-based Palmetto Health Children’s Hospital.

Over the past six years, the Children’s Hospital has seen about 1,950 cases from Orangeburg and Calhoun counties with a combined 18,000 days of care. The hospital’s estimated daily cost savings due to Palmetto Children’s Hospital is about $300 per day.

The hospital provides area children with pediatric intensive care as well as neonatal care.

T&D Staff Writer Gene Zaleski can be reached by e-mail at gzaleski@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5551.

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