HIGH PROFILE: Former doctor kept Arkansas Heart Hospital in Arkansans' hands

What is it like to own a hospital?

To hear the former Dr. Bruce Murphy tell it, it's thrilling. "Fabulous." A job so big it was worth stepping away from a 30-year career as a physician. And he was an ambitious interventional cardiologist, focused like the laser beams he worked with, keen as the tiny wires he threaded through cluttered arteries to stop heart attacks or restore the use of limbs.

On the other hand, a hospital owner sometimes wakes up in a cold sweat.

To do what Murphy did in 2011, pull together about $110 million in financing and buy out the parent company of Arkansas Heart Hospital, he had to give up his medical license. If you ask, he will tell you what he thinks about the part of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that required him to do so. But that's ancient history.

Bottom line, he voluntarily quit the practice of medicine so MedCath Inc. wouldn't sell the hospital he built with his best friends to some out-of-state corporate Blob. He calls them, his longtime partners, "the Magnificent 8," and he has had their faces Photoshopped onto the faces of the cinematic Magnificent Seven. They're riding horses together in a framed portrait in his office.

He still has the six white coats and stethoscope hanging in his closet at home, and he doesn't mind that people call him "doctor." He enjoyed that patients voted for him as "best cardiologist" in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's Best of the Best contest years after he wasn't a contender.

He doesn't miss doctoring. He thought he would, but he doesn't.

"I'll just tell you that I was a very, very busy doctor," Murphy says. "The cath lab, which is where I worked and did most of my work on legs and heart and that sort of thing, and teach, it's a very intense place to live and work, OK? You're wearing lead, you're getting radiation, people are literally on the verge of dying at any moment."

And he was only saving one life at a time. A more efficient way to help people would be to help them in batches, right? The thought occurred to him years ago while he was teaching procedures. By deploying other guys to do what he did, he could work on fewer bodies but save more lives.

Now think about this: A health-care facility takes care of even more people at one time. "Thousands and thousands and thousands -- 100,000 people a year, and that's Arkansans we take care of," he says. And who runs the health-care facility? This guy.

Bruce Murphy, 64, is president and chief executive officer and (having repaid the minor investors who helped out in 2011) sole owner of a 20-year-old, 112-bed, nationally recognized teaching hospital at 1701 S. Shackleford Road in Little Rock that's associated with 29 clinics around the state. It specializes in the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease; it has a bariatric and metabolic institute, and it is conducting something like 45 medical research studies at any given time.

Its boss prides himself on being a "disruptor" of stodgy protocols that stand doctors on pedestals so tall patients don't question what they're paying; and he never stops updating his medical education and looking for smarter technology.

"So I am literally traveling monthly, internationally, looking at and for either startups or other technologies that will be useful in Arkansas," he says.

One developing project is an in-house company called Thrive he expects to drive down the cost of medicine by selling it like other retail services. Through apps, software and hospital protocols, patients would select treatments much the way airline websites let passengers decide how much to pay for tickets.

His longtime friend and one of MedCath's former CEOs of Arkansas Heart Hospital, Charlie Smith, came out of retirement to help him buy the business and worked beside him for two years while he settled in. Murphy had been Smith's medical director and knew all about delivering health care, and his rapport with his patients was "magical."

Fundamentally, "he is a bold entrepreneur," Smith says. "And that's where I think his successes have been, in that he looks at opportunities that no one else would really look at in that they are difficult and they are risky."

LAWN MOGUL

Dr. C.D. Williams, the 76-year-old cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon who directs the hospital's surgical department, remembers his first impression of Bruce Murphy, med student. Same as it is today, he says: "Eager young man."

Three decades ago, Williams looked up from the cavity of someone's chest to a bright mind peering over a surgical screen, absorbing every move.

"Open-minded," he adds. "Willing to take a risk and wants to be on the forefront of technology and loves new technology. Lots of energy. ... He comes from a father who is much like that. His father is a preacher, of course. His father is sharp as a tack."

The Rev. Fred Bruce and June Murphy raised five children, mostly at Stephens in Ouachita County. Today the population's about 800, but it was bigger when he was a kid -- enough to make a boy wealthy mowing lawns.

He didn't get to learn a foreign language in his little high school or master calculus, but "at the same time I think that there was a lot more that I learned about life and about ethics and tradition and culture -- all the things that are so much a fabric of living."

The parsonage had an air conditioner, a window unit, and it was "a very nice house." The Murphys weren't hungry-poor -- because small town Baptists might only pay their preacher $400 a month -- but they saw that he ate well.

"We were constantly inundated with vegetables," Murphy says.

But he remembers "the peer pressure" in seventh grade because he only owned two shirts and two pairs of pants. "All year long I wore one shirt and pair of pants one day, and one shirt, one pair of pants the next, and Mom washed them every night."

At 10 he started mowing lawns, lining up as many as 25 jobs a day, at $5 each.

When he was about 12, he landed a job at Stephens Hardware and Appliance Co., where owner John Marvin Davis taught him about plumbing, electricity, pipes, appliances, guns, furniture.

By his junior and senior years of high school, Murphy was taking classes in the mornings so he could work in the store from 1 p.m. to closing -- "selling to people, taking care of people, delivering, putting in air conditioners, putting in refrigerators and freezers, hooking up TVs for the first time."

All the kids grew up to be workers. His brother -- who is blind and has multiple disabilities -- works in a sheltered workshop in El Dorado with their father and mother, who are 89 and 84. Brother Tim Murphy owns retail businesses in El Dorado and Conway; Dr. Fred Murphy is an internist in Magnolia. "And then my younger sister, the fifth child, Tammy, she's a housewife and she's a hard worker, too, thin as a whippet hound and runs like a spotted ape."

Preachers' kids play the piano, and he counts himself a "pretty good" singer, but he doesn't sing. He played sports in school and liked running and basketball. But he wasn't one for recreation: "I was more interested in not having just two shirts in eighth grade."

He doesn't make a lot of time for hobbies today, either. He bikes for health and business on the River Trail and while he's traveling. And he walks his five dogs two miles a day -- four fluffy-headed little bichon frises and a black-white-tan squirrel dog from the White River bottoms.

Smith says it's a hoot to see him walking Stella, Savannah, Sam, Skip and Shadow on their five leashes. Also it's funny to see them lining up in their little kennels at night.

RACING

Whatever the limits of the Stephens High School curriculum, he graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's of science from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock -- determined to fly jet airplanes. Three years at the Air Force Academy in Colorado brought him to his senses.

He decided to cure cancer instead.

At the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, he excelled in cell biology and immersed himself in the much-too quiet research lab. "I wasn't getting a lot of conversation out of the white rats that I was dealing with."

So in 1980 when he obtained his doctorate in pharmacology, he turned around and entered med school -- unaware that a Golden Age of interventional cardiology was dawning.

"I got interested in every subject that I went to," he says. "I wanted to do pediatrics, and I wanted to do general surgery. Then I wanted to be a radiologist. Then I wanted to be a dermatologist. Then I ended up wanting to do internal medicine and later cardiology."

Cardiology let him stop a heart attack in its tracks using wire and tiny balloons. And then came stents.

In 1993 at St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center, Murphy "won," by about one hour, an unofficial race with Dr. Randal Hundley, a cardiologist at Baptist Medical Center, to install the first stent inside a heart artery in Arkansas.

He took what he sees as a leadership role in bringing other new techniques to Arkansas, using the rotoblator and directional atherectomy. Little Rock Cardiology Clinic, the practice group he joined, made headlines with the state's first "64-slice" 3-D imaging. He pioneered treating peripheral artery disease -- giving clot-crippled patients back their legs.

Along the way, Murphy married, had two children. "We had a divorce about 25 years ago and it was very painful to me and my children, and there's an alienation that has gone on for a very long period of time. So my family is my family. And the people I work with, they're my family."

COMBAT

Little Rock Cardiology made a lot more headlines in the 1990s and 2000s after the state Legislature passed the Patient Protection Act of 1995. Better known as "any willing provider," it required private insurance companies to open health maintenance organization plan networks to any provider meeting the entry requirements.

Cardiologists saw an opening for single-disease hospitals to compete with the (lucrative) cardiac units of the market's leading hospitals, especially Baptist Health Medical Center and the then St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center.

When the cardiologists' deep-pockets partner, MedCath Inc. of Charlotte, N.C., opened Arkansas Heart Hospital in 1997 with 84 beds, it was the nation's second stand-alone cardiac hospital. It had a full service emergency room but otherwise focused on open-heart surgery and the unblocking of arteries. MedCath owned 70.3 percent; the doctors were minority investors.

Ten years of litigation ensued as older hospitals blocked enforcement of "any willing provider." It also brought a storm of advertising in print and on radio, TV, billboards, the sides of buses.

Blocked from treating the privately insured, the heart hospital survived by reaching out into the state, advertising to Medicare and Medicaid patients.

The struggle did not end in 2005 when Pulaski County Circuit Judge Collins Kilgore ruled the law should be enforced, outlawing exclusive HMO arrangements like one between Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield and Baptist Health. Baptist fought back by denying privileges to the doctors who'd invested in the competitor.

"I think in some minds' eyes we were seen as cowboys," Murphy says.

But in 2009 the state Supreme Court ruled out such "economic credentialing."

The "cowboys'" war for a piece of the Arkansas cardiac-care turf seemed won. Smith decided it was time to retire, enjoy his grandkids.

And then MedCath announced it was broke.

LOYALTY

Murphy says he gave up being a doctor because somebody had to or nothing would have survived from the years invested by his Magnificent 8: Drs. David Mego, Brian Barlow, James J. Kane, William Rollefson, David C. Bauman, Andrew Henry, Scott L. Beau -- and Bruce Murphy.

"Loyalty," Smith says.

"He's got some rough sides. He's been wounded several times with people, and it takes kind of a little while to get back. But he's got a heart of gold. Will give you anything you need, whatever you want. ... Arkansas is extremely fortunate and has benefited greatly from his medical acumen and his generosity as a person."

Today the former doctor likes his work as a globe-trotting medical visionary better than his old job, because the stakes are higher.

"This is a harder job. You don't know how many times I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat just realizing we've got to be successful," he says. "We have no choice because we're not part of a system, we're independent. We're strong. We have a strong reputation, but we're independent, and so every day is about success.

"There is no safety net for us to fall into except our own wits and our own ambition."

High Profile on 10/22/2017