VALDOSTA, Ga. – The emergency room was the urgent issue during the Hospital Authority of Valdosta/Lowndes County meeting Wednesday.

“We have a throughput problem, not a bed problem,” Dr. Jaime Upegui, Division II president of Apogee Physicians, said of the South Georgia Medical Center emergency room.

“More beds is actually counterintuitive,” Emergency Department Director Irene Sheppard said.

“Throughput” means efficiently getting patients into and out of the hospital.

Upegui said getting patients through the E.R. more effectively means more revenue for the hospital and more revenue could mean improved staffing.

Dr. Joshua Case said “just having enough people” would address many of the long waits in the emergency room.

SGMC contracted Apogee Physicians to solves issues with staffing. Case and Upegui work with Apogee.

Case said turnover had been bad with previous hospitalist groups but Apogee is making progress at SGMC.

SGMC has already saved $149,000 by adding more permanent staff as opposed to traveling physicians, Case said.

He said SGMC has added four additional physicians and a nurse practitioner, with other interviews planned.

In other business, the medical school “is still moving forward,” Hospital Authority Chairman Sam Allen said.

Previously, the Hospital Authority was involved with a stalled agreement to turn the current Valdosta High School building into a future medical school. 

Recently, the city school board has discussed selling the property to a developer interested in installing a medical school at the site.

The Hospital Authority went into executive session for approximately one hour.

Chief Financial Officer Grant Byers said Epic is “on budget and on schedule.” Chief Information Officer Bob Foster added that the project “is now fully staffed.”

Epic is the new electronic health record system the hospital is rolling out.

The Hospital Authority voted to hire Dr. Grant Byers as chief financial officer.

Byers had previously acted as interim CFO.

Ben Copeland was officially sworn into the Hospital Authority.

Byers thanked audit team members Julie Hodges and Sara Alford for “two consecutive years of no audit adjustments.”