Unfortunately for Hilton Head Hospital, the deal fell through last summer. And when St. Anthony's administrators later learned of the plan, they were less than thrilled.
Medenica's Denver clinic sits at the far northeast corner of Denver West, the highly successful office park off I-70 between Denver and Golden that earned the Stevinson family a good chunk of its fortune. It is four stories high and built in the brown sameness as the rest of the park. In the fifteen minutes he has before a meeting, Chuck Stevinson has agreed to a tour.
Although he repeatedly refers to himself as "scarred," the 66-year-old Stevinson still looks remarkably good these days. The skin on his face is discolored in several spots, and he walks with a marked limp. Yet he drives himself to work every day and doesn't leave until evening.
The clinic is still largely undeveloped, and the doctor's offices are empty. But it is clear that Stevinson has big plans. The first floor is filled with large and very expensive diagnostic machines; it is also the outpatient surgery center. On the third floor, he has persuaded Bonfils, the blood company, to set up a branch so Medenica's lab work won't have far to travel. Down the hall is another modern lab to run other tests for the doctor.
Whether or not it will ever be filled full-time remains to be seen. Stevinson himself seems confident. Last month, however, St. Anthony's Hospital downgraded Medenica's privileges from permanent to temporary, in effect putting on hold any plans it may have had of accepting the Yugoslav as part of its staff. In an even greater show of nonconfidence, the hospital also restricted Medenica's practice to only current patients.
A spokeswoman for St. Anthony's insists that downgrading a physician's privileges is not unusual; beyond that, she declines comment. But sources familiar with the hospital say the actions were taken because Medenica did not inform St. Anthony's in a timely matter of the restrictions put on his Hilton Head practice.
That, along with Medenica's stormy past on Hilton Head, has made him a legal headache. If St. Anthony's accepts him, the Denver hospital--because of the devastating peer review Medenica absorbed in South Carolina--could be a sitting target for any of his patients who decide to sue. Yet if they deny him employment at the hospital, St. Anthony's administrators may face the litigious wrath of Stevinson, who has shown that he is not averse to protecting his physician through the courts.
Still, one person intimately familiar with the negotiations between St. Anthony's and Medenica predicts that the hospital will choose to fight Medenica rather than risk any future disgruntled patients. "He'll never get privileges," says the source.
That possibility does not disturb Chuck Stevinson. "I guarantee you that we're not going to let a small group of doctors let us die," he says. If Medenica doesn't get privileges at St. Anthony's, he adds, "we'll just build a new hospital."
end of part 2
