From survival to growth with an unexpected leader

When Three Crosses Regional Hospital was being planned in Las Cruces, Denten Park wanted no part of it. More precisely, he didn’t want it built.

Park was CEO of MountainView Regional Medical Center at the time, and he believed the city’s health care needs could be met without adding a third hospital.

“I did everything I could to keep the third hospital from ever coming here,” Park said. “If I would have had my way, I never would have built Three Crosses.”

Today, Park is sitting in the CEO’s office at the hospital he once thought Las Cruces didn’t need, talking about making it bigger. His perspective has changed.

“Competition’s good,” Park said. “Competition’s good in a lot of ways.”

At Three Crosses, that competition comes at a pivotal point. The hospital that opened during the COVID-19 pandemic and struggled financially through much of its first five years is now adding physicians, services and equipment, with plans that include expanded cardiology, cardiac surgery, urgent and primary care, robotic surgery and additional operating and cardiac catheterization capacity.

Park describes the relationship among Three Crosses, MountainView and Memorial Medical Center as “collaborative competition” — hospitals competing for patients and physicians while also relying on one another to keep more Southern New Mexico patients from leaving the region for care.

“The best care, almost without fail, is care close to home,” Park said.

Keeping patients close to home, he said, means more than where a procedure takes place. Families and support systems are nearby. Prescriptions, medical equipment and follow-up appointments are easier to coordinate. And patients who need rehabilitation, home health or other services after leaving the hospital can remain connected to local providers.

That, Park said, is where having three hospitals can make a difference.

“There may be some things that are not being done that we’ll enter into and try to do,” he said. “But for the vast majority of the services, I call it a collaborative competition.”

The most visible example of what Three Crosses is trying to build may be cardiology.

Park said the hospital had one cardiologist when he arrived, along with four advanced practitioners with extensive cardiology experience. It now has four cardiologists, with another expected to begin soon and a sixth anticipated in the near future. The hospital also has added two electrophysiology providers.

Three Crosses is now working toward adding cardiac surgery, which Park said could be in place during the first quarter of 2027.

“There’s very few things within the next few months that are done anywhere in the country that we don’t do here from a cardiology perspective,” he said.

The growth extends beyond heart care.

Three Crosses plans to open an urgent care facility in November, with plans for it to operate seven days a week, 12 hours a day, by December. Park said six or seven primary-care providers are expected to join the organization between now and the end of the year.

The hospital also is adding a da Vinci robotic surgical system, an investment Park said is important both for expanding surgical capabilities and recruiting younger surgeons who trained using robotic technology.

An additional cardiac catheterization lab and another operating room are planned for the first or early second quarter of next year.

Those plans represent a significant change for a hospital that spent much of its early existence trying to establish financial footing.

Three Crosses opened in October 2020, after the pandemic delayed its original opening plans. The 46-bed hospital entered a health care environment transformed by COVID-19, with sharply increased staffing and supply costs.

Three Crosses also was among a small number of newly opened hospitals that received little of the federal pandemic relief that flowed to established hospitals. National reporting in 2022 documented millions of dollars in losses at Three Crosses as it attempted to establish itself during the pandemic.

Park said the circumstances compounded the financial challenges that already come with opening a hospital.

“Starting a hospital in the middle of COVID, probably not ideal,” he said. “It was a very, very difficult time.”

There were other early decisions Park said, with the benefit of hindsight, might have been made differently. The result was a hospital that remained in a difficult financial position for years.

But Park said Three Crosses has now reached the point where its monthly operations are financially stable.

“We’re there from a monthly perspective of where we need to be,” he said.

That doesn’t mean the financial recovery is finished.

Park said Three Crosses still has debt accumulated during those difficult years that will take several more years to pay. At the same time, it is spending millions of dollars on the equipment, facilities and physician recruitment needed to grow.

“We’ve had to try to pay back all this debt that we’ve had,” Park said. “We’ve had to try to grow along the way. And so that’s a challenge.”

Park is familiar with both Las Cruces and the challenges of running a hospital.

He came to MountainView as chief operating officer before becoming CEO in 2009. He remained in that position until 2018, when he left Las Cruces to become market CEO for Northwest Health, a multi-hospital system in Arkansas.

His earlier career included hospital leadership positions in Arizona, Utah and Wyoming. He also has an MBA from New Mexico State University.

His return puts him in a considerably different hospital than the one he previously led.

Three Crosses is much smaller than MountainView and Memorial, something Park sees as both a limitation and an advantage. At times, Three Crosses can run out of physical beds. But its smaller size and local decision-making structure also allow it to move more quickly, he said.

The hospital’s board is heavily represented by physicians who practice on the campus, giving doctors a direct voice in decisions about patient care, services and hospital culture.

“We’re very nimble,” Park said. “We don’t have the money the other two hospitals have. They have a lot of money, so they’re able to do some things that maybe we can’t do, but we’re able to move very, very quickly.”

That doesn’t mean Three Crosses can add everything at once.

Park said the hospital regularly hears from physicians and patients interested in services it doesn’t yet have. But expansion has to come in stages, particularly as the hospital balances investment in new services against debt left from its first years.

“We have to grow in a stepwise fashion,” he said.

Recruiting the people needed for that growth presents another challenge.

New Mexico has struggled to recruit and retain physicians and other health care professionals, and Park said Three Crosses faces the same difficulty. Hospitals also are losing experienced nurses, technicians and other workers to retirement, leaving younger employees to replace not only their numbers but years of accumulated experience.

Park said partnerships with New Mexico State University, Doña Ana Community College, medical education programs and local residency programs will be increasingly important to building that workforce.

Training physicians in Las Cruces, he said, also gives the community a better chance of keeping them.

Park's goal is not necessarily for Three Crosses to duplicate everything already being done at MountainView and Memorial. There will be plenty of overlap. All three hospitals provide inpatient and outpatient care, surgery, orthopedics and cardiac services. They will compete for patients and physicians, and Park expects that competition to continue.

But there also may be specialized services where collaboration makes more sense than three hospitals building the same programs. And competition itself, Park said, can raise expectations.

“If one hospital in our community does well, then the other ones say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. I’ve got to do better,’” he said. “Whether that’s quality or patient access or service-line initiatives, we all have the necessity to compete effectively to be better.”

It is a different view from the one Park had when plans for Three Crosses first emerged.

He still isn’t convinced Las Cruces necessarily needed a third hospital then. But Three Crosses exists now, and Park believes its presence can give patients more choices, expand the care available locally and push all three hospitals to improve.

And the hospital he once hoped would never open is the one he has been charged with helping grow.