Honolulu Star-Advertiser from Honolulu, Hawaii • A16

A16 FRIDAY 6112 NAME IN THE NEWS Eugene Tiwanak A pioneer in promoting cost-effective long-term care is leading a bid to buy two bankrupt isle hospitals California, that has put in an undisclosed bid to acquire both HMC East in Liliha and HMC West in Ewa. The two hospitals were owned by Hawaii Medical Center but went bankrupt and were closed early this year. Before HMC, the hospitals were owned by St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii, which still owns the land beneath them. Tiwanak joined St.

Francis in 1973 as director of fund development, after working for Hawaiian Telephone Co. in public relations. In 1984, he left St. Francis to become managing director of Hawaii County under Mayor Dante Carpenter, where one of his unpleasant experiences, he said, was having to cut county funding for social programs, which helped him to appreciate the needs of seniors. Tiwanak returned to St.

Francis in 1987 as vice president, mainly to complete development of the St. Francis hospital in Ewa (now HMC West). He also helped form St. Francis Healthcare Foundation of Hawaii, becoming its president and chief executive, and also became president of St. Francis Residential Care Community, which recently completed developing 150 senior assisted-living rental apartments in Ewa, called Franciscan Vistas Ewa.

He retired from those two St. Francis subsidiaries in 2007. A former U.S. Army captain who served two tours in Vietnam, Tiwanak also is a former Lunalilo Home trustee and board member of a nonprofit that in the late 1960s built the 857-unit low-income Kukui Gardens apartment complex at the edge of Chinatown. He is a product of Catholic schools Maryknoll in Honolulu and the University of San Francisco, where he obtained a degree in psychology.

Now 70, Tiwanak is married to the former Mary Juanita Hagan, of Louisville, whom he met while at Army training at Fort Knox, and with whom he has three adult children. They are celebrating their 49th wedding anniversary this month. By Mark Coleman mcolemanstaradvertiser.com Eugene Tiwanak is on a mission. His goal is to improve health care delivery to Hawaii's increasing number of elderly who wish to "age in place" preferably in their own homes, but if not there, then in nursing homes or other facilities that are less costly and more comfortable than hospitals. Part of his motivation is monetary, since government reimbursements for medical care are shifting toward reducing patient hospital stays, but also, Tiwanak said, he agrees with his mentor and former boss at St.

Francis Hospital, Sister Maureen Keleher, that people heal quicker and age more "nicely" in their own surroundings. Currently, Tiwanak is owner of Tiwanak Associates, a management consulting firm for nonprofits, and a partner in a hui with Hampton Health of much attuned to what was happening with their asset sale to Hawaii Medical Center, then the problems that arose thereafter. So I was active as a consultant looking for buyers, and was approached by half-a-dozen or so different groups, including two local groups, and even the state, as to the possibility of assisting them as a consultant in putting together a program. Then I was approached by Hampton Health and we started talking, and they were describing their intention and so forth, and I said, I liked the concept, and I could see it working. Why did you form Tiwanak Associates before you quit St.

Francis? I had done that because I was appointed by the state state Supreme Court to be a Lunalilo Home trustee, so as a matter of tax and IRS purposes, I had to develop a separate company for filing and so forth. I was a trustee for 13 years before I stepped down and retired. In fact, I will share this with you, that recently it was announced that St. Francis' Franciscan Vistas Ewa program, was completed. It's a planned residential community on 24 acres, plus 150 senior rental apartments, and it is intended to provide long-term care assisted services in this residential care community.

I was the president of that residential care community. And, for the most part, that was a concept that I was developing while I was a trustee for Lunalilo Home. We wanted to expand the reach of Lunalilo from a 42-bed facility and wanted to reach out. I called it "Stay healthy at home." We were trying to provide some kind of home outreach team project that could go to care homes and provide question: It seems like your life has been focused on medical and elderly care services. So I started wondering: You pretty much grew up in the Catholic Church, it seems, so is this part of your religious mission in life, or just something that became an area of expertise for you? answer: It became an area of expertise.

And I have to say this, if you don't mind: I was really prompted by my first boss at St. Francis Hospital, Sister Maureen Keleher. She was a visionary. Period. She just so mentored me, and I just feel like I'm carrying on that same sort of vision she had.

Basically, she believed that patients heal quicker and get better the closer they are to their own home environments. That was her basic philosophy. That's why St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii has programs on all the major islands, because of that one belief. Being one of her administrators, that's what I learned.

And I guess I believed it, and I still believe it. I don't want to die in a hospital. Speaking of hospitals, the reason your name has been in the news lately is because you're leading this hui that put in a bid to buy out of bankruptcy HMC East in Liliha and HMC West in Ewa, which used to be owned by the Franciscan sisters, and I was wondering how you came to be involved in this. It goes back to my consulting company (Tiwanak Associates), because as a consultant, my focus was on nonprofits, in organizational management and strategic management planning. But in the process, I also was helping St.

Francis in their transition, so I was still very administrative assistance, allowing care home operators to take respite, to take their vacation to the mainland or Australia or wherever, so that the care of the patient was still there. We knew we had qualified health care professionals that could serve the care home where it's just the owner of the house. They call it Type 1, by the way. It's five residents or less; Type 2, like Lunalilo Home, is anything over five. The difference is, essentially, the amount of attention required and staffing and so forth.

So when I retired (from Lunalilo Home), since I already had this company I didn't call it Tiwanak Associates at that time then I retired from St. Francis, but now it gave me the opportunity to further my own vision, if you will, for long-term care. You know, health care is all about reimbursements and insurance. Adult residential care is that first level outside of the insurance reimbursements system. It goes from acute care to skilled nursing to nursing home, and then it drops to care homes, and at that level there is no insurance reimbursement.

But that's where most people are. So I felt that if we can make a model work so that it costs less than what it costs you in skilled nursing, this would be the future model. Have you been able to accomplish that? We haven't gone that far yet. As I understand it, you intend to turn the Liliha hospital into a geriatric care center. Yes.

What's the thinking behind that? It's a couple of things. First of all, you've got to look at the market, in terms of the changes in the reimbursement scheme, and also in terms of how best to retool your operations, in light of competition. Competition is fierce now in the medical field. Think about it: You've got five major hospitals within, what, about five miles of each other Castle, Straub, Kapiolani, Kuakini, right? And when St. Francis, and then HMC, was up, you had five of them right there.

So the model is redefining the facilities and the need for these high-tech areas within the acute-care setting, when in fact you need to minimize that hospital acute-care area and move to the next level, which may be a skilled nursing home or a geriatric center. Or even a care home. Right. The government even has a program I think they're touting, the medical home model. Remember my model about Lunalilo Home? That's why I'm so focused on that.

And you're thinking of keeping the Ewa hospital more like a regular, full-service hospital, with an emergency room; that's part of your model? No. To be a major medical center. What does that mean? Well, to be able to get all the services that are required, right there, including offices for your attending physicians. Right now you gotta come downtown. Where are people who need emergency services on the Ewa side going right now? To Pali Momi (in Pearlridge).

But, again, to answer your question about what are we going to do, even when we started to develop (St. Francis) West, I always said don't forget the people in Central Oahu. You think they're going to grab THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN In thorny times, Paul Simon opened a lot of closed eyes 'Hey Paul Simon is in town, you know, and he's looking for some And I said, 'Paul Simon, who is Paul I mean I had no idea. And then the guy tried to explain to me.

He's singing all the songs. You know, like the songs from Simon and Garfunkel. And I'm like, 'It doesn't ring a And then I take my bass and I go to the studio and so I meet Paul and Roy Halee, the engineer, and they're like 'Hey man, let's, you know, let's play We'd play a chord Paul would smile and then he'll stop and change it. We didn't know why is he changing? But he needed another part there that we did n't know. Then he'll break and give us different chords, and then we learned different things, and it was like going back to music school." Watching this film is, indeed, like going to music school and much more.

For many, it will be going back to the first time they really heard the unique harmonies and rhythms of African music thanks to "Graceland." For some, it will be going inside the studio of one the most creative musicians of our time, watching him probing and experimenting with the styles, voices and melodies of South African musicians and melding them with chords and lyrics danc ing in his own head into songs that we've been humming ever since. Who knew she had diamonds on the soles of her shoes? But what intrigued me was going back to the politics of the mid-1980s, when South African apartheid was at its most vicious, prompting the African National Congress, or A.N.C., to call for a total diplomatic, economic, sports and cultural boycott. This was before the Internet, globalization, iTunes and YouTube. Simon was drawn into South African music by a cassette tape someone sent him of the Boyoyo Boys. The musician in him insisted on following that sound to its origins, politics be damned.

By daring to ignore the cultural boycott to make Graceland, he helped globalize the talents and sounds of a group of South African musicians the old-fashioned way one concert and album at a time and, in the process, empowered those artists in ways no liberation movement ever could. Today, the Boyoyo Boys would have just cut a YouTube video and globalized themselves. But that wasn't possible back then. Still, did Simon have the right, and was he right, to do what he did? Interwoven through the Of all the raw and compelling voices in Joe Berlinger's must-see documentary, "Under African Skies," about the making of Paul Simon's classic "Graceland" album in South Africa in 1985 and his reunion with the same African artists 25 years later my favorite is that of Graceland bass player Bakithi Kumalo. He tells about that day in 1985 when he met Simon in a Johannesburg recording studio: "I was just working as a mechanic," says Kumalo, "and one day I got this call from the boss and he said, DOONESBURY Garry Trudeau I WHEN YOU WERE A STU- YBS, BUT AS A TS VBHT HBRB, YOU ALWAYS STILL PROFESSIONAL.

SEEMEP READY TO TAKE AM, SIR. IT'S AN INSPIR- SOMEONE'S HEAP OFF! -y-- WELCOME BACK, THANKS, MR. 1 feT, MEU9SA. WE'RE 6 nAle I AIL SO PROUD HARD TO VgPZES EXPRESS YOURSELF Write us: We welcome letters up to 150 words, and guest columns of 500-600 words. We reserve the right to edit for clarity and length.

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