Cheyenne hospital’s doctors voice concerns; board supports CEO
CHEYENNE — Dr. Damon Kennedy has often been the sole heart surgeon at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center over the past nine years.
During his nearly a decade in town, he had joined several committees at CRMC and said he saw around 15 cardiologists come and go through the catheterization laboratory, where cardiac catheterization procedures are performed.
His concerns first arose around three-and-a-half years ago when the “cath lab” was shut down after three complications, or deaths, occurred in one week. He said the lab reopened two days later.
Kennedy said he felt the cardiologists in charge at the time were not being honest with families and not telling the whole story of how the complications occurred, presumably because they did not want to own up to their mistakes.
Kennedy took these concerns, about practices he considered unethical, to hospital administration, including CRMC President and CEO Tim Thornell.
“There were a lot of comments made about patient safety and patient advocacy and all these, I guess we’ll say nice comments, but then I would argue that zero was ever done about anything to fix it,” he said.
Kennedy said he continued to speak up to try to see more accountability and care for the community from the administration, but he eventually lost hope. He left CRMC in December.
“A lack of ethics and lack of accountability is why I left, and it’s disappointing again, because it didn’t have to be that way, meaning, supposedly someone’s in charge of that and should have been paying attention and managing it,” he said.
Two days after Kennedy left, a group of CRMC providers passed a vote of no confidence in Thornell.
Staffing and administrative concerns
Since then, several other doctors employed by the local hospital have left over staffing and administrative concerns, saying they no longer see it as a healthy place to work.
Following the vote of no confidence, the CRMC Board of Trustees launched a review of internal quality metrics, staffing and safety data, physician and staff feedback, and engaged in direct conversations with individuals across departments and roles, including clinical, support and administrative staff. The board also opened multiple confidential channels for employees and medical staff to share concerns, according to CRMC.
When the review concluded, the hospital’s board unanimously voted to have “full confidence” in Thornell.
“This decision was based on the totality of information reviewed, not a single vote or moment, but a broader look at performance, stability and the path forward for the organization,” Pete Obermueller, CRMC Board of Trustees chairman, told the WTE in a statement on behalf of the board.
In a separate statement sent to media last week, CRMC commended Thornell for guiding the hospital through the COVID-19 pandemic and raising profit margins to a level that exceeds industry standards.
“This financial stability enables us to reinvest directly into our community, enhance the quality of care and support the long-term sustainability of our services,” the statement said. “Additionally, our strong patient satisfaction scores reflect the high level of care and compassion our teams deliver every day. These accomplishments collectively reinforce our confidence that Tim remains the right person to lead this organization moving forward.”
Dr. Steve Burgess worked at CRMC for more than six years as a hospitalist, a doctor who specializes in caring for patients while they are in the hospital.
Hospitalists focus on managing inpatient care, such as diagnosing, treating and coordinating services during a hospital stay.
Another hospitalist was Dr. Tyler Maxey. He said there were typically 16 or 17 hospitalists on staff, with six working each day and one working in the evening, alongside a nurse practitioner to staff the hospital 24 hours a day.
Maxey estimated he was typically seeing 14 or 15 patients each day with six hospitalists staffed per day. According to a 2020 study from Health Services Research, a hospitalist’s capacity should be to care for between 10 and 15 patients per day.
Changes to the organization of the hospitalist staffing last year, however, increased the workload.
By the time Burgess informed the hospital he would be leaving to go work in Texas earlier this year, he said he had been seeing around 23 patients per day.
“I’m pretty efficient about what I do, but it got to the point where I’m seeing the patient for the first time that day at 9:15 in the evening when I started at 7 a.m., and that’s just not safe,” Burgess said.
The change came when CRMC sold the management of the hospitalist group to an outside provider, Aligned Providers Wyoming. When APW took over, the number of hospitalists working per day decreased from six to five, increasing the workload.
At the time, Burgess and Maxey said they opposed the sale and were not informed why it needed to occur. Both speculated the move was likely financially motivated.
“We didn’t think that it was beneficial for the hospital to sell the management of our group to Aligned Providers. We were against it,” Maxey said. “And the hospital had conducted this sale without ever informing us that they were considering selling our group to another outside entity.”
In a May 15 media statement, CRMC said the change to Aligned Providers “offers physicians more control over their work schedules, helping to address some of the staffing frustrations voiced by hospitalists.”
Obermueller told the WTE that CRMC has maintained full hospitalist coverage throughout recent years and continues to do so.
He said in a statement that to “strengthen consistency in inpatient care and ensure accountability to patient safety standards, CRMC recently transitioned its hospitalist services to Aligned Providers Wyoming. Outsourcing department management is a common and successful practice of hospitals across the country. This model supports reliable, around-the-clock care, and was implemented following challenges with current hospitalists meeting shift coverage expectations under the previous structure.”
When a group of providers met in December to pass a vote of no confidence, the providers also supported a resolution to postpone the implementation of the changes to the hospitalist service. Several sources told the WTE around 65 providers cast ballots at the meeting, though more attended, and around 70% voted no confidence in Thornell.
Though not confirmed by CRMC, Burgess and Maxey both said around 70% of the hospitalists employed one year ago at this time are no longer employed at the hospital.
“(There was) no explanation as to why the hospitalists were going to be employed by an outside group. No explanation as to the changes in staffing levels,” Burgess said. “They just said, ‘Well, this is what we’re doing,’ and doing it at a time when the hospital is operating in the black, not in the red, and they say patient satisfaction scores were the highest that they’ve been in a decade. Well, clearly, we’re doing a good job, so why mess with us?”
Maxey added that when he asked hospital administration if the change was a patient safety concern, he said the reply was an “emphatic no.”
When he moved here four years ago, Maxey told his wife he never wanted to move again, and he wanted Cheyenne to be the place where they raised their kids. However, he is now headed to work in South Dakota after his time at CRMC concludes in around one month.
Obermueller said he respects the individuals’ decisions to leave the hospital and noted that hospitalists make up only 10% of CRMC’s overall provider network.
“These departures reflect only a specific subset, not the entirety of physicians and advanced practice providers who continue to care for our community every day,” Obermueller said in a statement. “CRMC remains adequately staffed, and can deliver high-quality care, just as we have before.”
Profit margins and other concern
Dr. Steven Beer is a neurological surgeon who owns Wyoming Spine and Neurosurgery in Cheyenne. He has lived here for 25 years and, while not employed by CRMC, has worked closely with the nonprofit as a provider.
He said medical staff at the hospital has lost confidence in its leadership due to systemic failures.
“We’ve lost respected surgeons and specialists — not because they wanted to leave, but because of ethical concerns, broken promises, unsafe clinical practices, and reckless hiring decisions,” he told the WTE in a text message following an interview.
Beer said he sees the root of the problem as a leadership culture that prioritizes financial optics and internal loyalty over clinical safety.
According to a goal progress report from CRMC obtained by the WTE, the nonprofit had a 7.3% profit margin in the first quarter of 2024 and a 7% profit margin in the fourth quarter.
Earlier this week,Obermueller told Wyoming News Now that since Thornell became CEO in 2019, CRMC was “rated by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as two stars out of five, but now they are four stars out of five.”
Beer said he sees flaunting the profit margins and ratings as a distraction from addressing more serious internal concerns.
“To boast a 7.3% margin at the same time you’re relying on polls that may or may not be accurate, and at the same time ignoring cries from the physician community, the experienced doctors that have been in the community, and then ignoring the patient complaints that we see from the community, I just wonder what truly motivates the decision to say, ‘Hey, Mr. Thornell, this is OK?’”
In addition to staffing and managerial concerns from the hospitalists and ethical and accountability concerns from Kennedy, Beer said some clinical services have not seen pay adjustments in nearly a decade, saying that radiologists provide extensive care with little assistance from the hospital.
“Looking at this from somebody who has 25 years of experience, who’s seen, I think, seven different CEOs come and go from that hospital, I think the perspective that I have is invaluable, and I think that it’s something that they need to pay attention to,” saying he does not want to assign blame but help CRMC improve and rebuild trust within its clinical community.
Along with the vote of no confidence in Thornell and the call for a halt to changes to hospitalist services, hospital providers passed two other resolutions showing no confidence in the physicians clinic director and calling to increase physician representation on the board of directors.
“While the resolutions passed among that group, it’s important to understand that the resolutions were not made available to the doctors beforehand, were not distributed at the meeting itself, and do not reflect the opinions of the many medical staff members the Board of Trustees spoke with over the last four months,” Obermueller told the WTE in a statement. “With respect to the hospitalist resolution, there was no text available, instead it was written after the vote took place.
“We respect the minority views expressed, however; the board’s responsibility is to consider the full scope of feedback, performance data, and operational impact when evaluating leadership.”
This story was published on May 2, 2025.