Striding through the halls of Arkansas Heart Hospital, Dr. Bruce Murphy finds someone with whom to speak around every corner. It’s clear that today is not the first time the rank-and-file of Arkansas’ seminal specialty hospital has seen the commander-in-chief; everyone he talks to is addressed by first name.
It’s not typical for a CEO to have that capacity, but most everyone around here will tell you Bruce Murphy is anything but typical. During his career, he not only helped found AHH and grow it into a nationally-recognized model for care in the United States – rattling the health care status quo in the process – but he’s also been a visionary thought leader on related specialties to branch into that have a direct impact on cardiac issues.
“I got to live in the golden age of cardiology,” he said. “We went all the way from not being able to help a heart attack other than with morphine and oxygen to, within a few years, being able to stop a heart attack with wire and a balloon to break up the thrombus or from a drug to dissolve the clot.”
“And then I got to live through the whole golden age of interventional cardiology in which we got directional wires, we got balloons, we got lasers, we got directional atherectomy. Then later, we got stents. I got to live, learn and teach all of those.”
During the course of this medical revolution, health care facilities in Little Rock lagged behind the pace of change, which brought Murphy’s dream of a cardiac-dedicated, physician-owned hospital into focus.
“The demand for cardiovascular services skyrocketed because now we could actually do things for people,” he said. “The infrastructure in Little Rock was clearly not set up for that. We had two cath labs at St. Vincent’s and we had two cath labs at Baptist. We were literally getting up in the middle of the night and going to do an elective procedure because there was no capacity during the day to do that.”
“We came to the natural conclusion that we needed more infrastructure for cardiology. That’s how this hospital was born.”
AHH opened in 1997 and almost immediately, it became clear expansion would be required to avoid the same logjams the hospital was trying to escape. Today, the company operates 30 satellite clinics and will soon christen a second hospital, Encore Campus, in Bryant.
“We’re congested and we’ve outgrown this particular location (in Little Rock),” Murphy said. “What most hospitals do when that happens is, they build another building. That does nothing to decrease their congestion problem, it compounds the problem. We looked at that and it was very clear that putting another building here and adding on some more operating rooms andf cath labs would only make our problems worse.”
“Bryant doesn’t have a hospital. It’s a very fast-growing community. It’s only 11 miles away and has beautifully located land right between Highway 5 and the interstate. So, the decision was made to build a hospital there and to move two of our busier products, bariatric surgery for adult obesity and peripheral vascular disease, to that hospital to decongest this campus.”
“At the same time, that hospital will be a general acute hospital. There will be kidney infections and pneumonias in there and it’ll be a full-service emergency department. We will have all the other things as far as imaging goes, including PET scanners, MRI’s, multi-slice ET’s and all the products you would need to run a first-class hospital.”
A native of Union County who received his collegiate and medical training from UA Little Rock and UAMS, Murphy said the onset of obesity has replaced smoking as the major cardiac risk factor.
“Today, if you’re 60 years old and obese you’ve got five years to live, on average,” he said. “Above age 70, there are no obese people; you just won’t see it because the disease itself is so systemic. It affects so many visceral organs that there’s so many ways for you to have a catastrophic death.”
“The obesity problem itself is a new problem. When I was a little boy, there were two diseases that never existed; adult and childhood obesity and opiate addiction. In my hometown of Huttig, Arkansas, and later at Stephens, Arkansas, where I graduated high school, there was not a single person in town that weighed more than 220 pounds. Not a single person.”
Because it’s such a relatively new phenomenon, Murphy sees hope in turning the tide on obesity through radical education reform. To prove it, he spearheaded a pilot program through the nonprofit Champions for Health at Morrilton Intermediate School last year.
“We got involved in trying to imbue a small, 500-person school of fourth, fifth and sixth graders to teach them about fitness, about nutrition, about obesity, about growing gardens, and about a healthy type of lifestyle,” he said. “This is not in books that are in that school and it’s an enormous weight to try and pick up because the momentum of our society is not headed in that direction.”
“Between the carbohydrate lobby or the milk lobby that affect Washington’s funds, it’s virtually impossible to change students’ diet. But at least we offered them water which they weren’t being offered before. And we did, in fact, have a meaningful statistical impact as judged by outside third–party sources.”
“This issue, though, has a magnitude such that it’s not something a foundation can do or a hospital can do. It really is on the magnitude that it has to be done at the government level and that requires laws, new regulations and funding to be directed in different areas.”
As for AHH itself, Murphy said hospital leadership is already turning its eyes toward further expansion, even as the Encore Campus nears completion.
“Right now, there’s almost an endless capacity to treat vascular disease in Arkansas,” he said. “If you look at where we are, from our 30 clinics and now two hospitals, there are some places (in the state) where we aren’t, obviously, Northwest Arkansas.”
“The Northwest Arkansas Council did a study that was published in January 2019 which showed there is $950 million per year of specialty care leaving Northwest Arkansas. And we’re not up there. We’ve always politely said that we’ve got some colleagues up there doing a nice job, but at the same time, competition makes everybody better. Those are potential areas of our growth.”
READ MORE: Arkansas Hospital CEOs – Bruce Murphy