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1st appeared 18 February 2000

Teams Tackle Myriad Issues as Merger Unwinds

Letters offering jobs at UCSF Medical Center are being mailed this week to the 4,100 UCSF Stanford Health Care employees who work at UCSF sites.

The job offers mark the beginning of a new era at UCSF and the final state of a disappointing merger of the hospitals at UCSF and Stanford University. But the act of welcoming employees back to the UCSF family before the merged entity dissolves at the end of March involves much more than a massive mailing.

From the moment the parent universities announced last October the decision to end the two-year merger, teams of workers from human resources, labor relations, benefits, payroll, legal, information technology, and many other offices began working intensively to resolve issues for a smooth transition of operations back to the University.

"We all began this process knowing it would be extremely complex and difficult to reintegrate the Medical Center in such a short period of time," says Randy Lopez, UCSF assistant vice chancellor for human resources.

The dissolution date has been postponed by a month to April 1 by circumstances beyond the control of either university. For example, UCSF and Stanford each must relicense their hospitals as separate entities with the California Department of Health Services. Each hospital also must be recertified by Medicare and Medicaid to be reimbursed for patient services.

Hundreds of other tasks required to meet the dissolution deadline range from ensuring continuation of vendor contracts to performing a final audit of the merged medical center’s finances. But ensuring that Medical Center employees get a job offer and a regular paycheck was one of the most challenging problems facing the transition teams.

Lopez managed UCSF’s hiring plan and coordinated the efforts of team members from UCSF, the UC Office of the President, and their interaction with UCSF Stanford Health Care.

The ability to hire 4,100 employees simultaneously required some innovation. Some broad issues involved every incoming employee while other problems affected only a handful of them.

The process began by creating thousands of data files containing personnel information required for automated hiring processes. Job descriptions had to be reviewed, and in some cases, created, and assigned to the appropriate job classification at UCSF. In some cases, such as citizenship forms required by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the information couldn’t be transferred to UCSF until a legal opinion was obtained to assure the legal propriety of accepting prior work certifications for affected employees. In still other cases, additional background checks of employees in sensitive positions had to be conducted.

The statutory requirement that all UC employees sign a loyalty and patent protection oath before working a single day for the University created an unusual dilemma since an authorized University employee must witness the oath. The team had to find a way to administer the oath to all Medical Center employees before their first day of work. The team considered a variety of options before agreeing to send some administrators into the Medical Center to obtain the signed oaths and to have staff available do the same at upcoming benefits meetings.

Usually, an employee who leaves UCSF and later returns receives no credit for their service elsewhere, but because the merger came about through special circumstances the transition team worked hard to make some special considerations possible. The job offers now going out to Medical Center employees contain the following special assurances:

• The same base wage rate, "red-circling" any salaries outside the established UC pay range for the position;

• Service credit for the purpose of vacation accrual and layoff "seniority points" for UCSF Stanford service;

• For those who were career employees of UCSF as of the hospital merger in 1987, the use of the employee’s earlier UC hire date for purposes of annuitant health coverage;

• The option to transfer Paid Time Off into UC vacation banks and automatic transfer of any extended sick leave into sick leave banks;

• Job offers to any employee on approved leaves of absence that honor the terms of their UCSF Stanford Health Care leave.

Employees will each receive extensive benefits information packets to be mailed shortly after the job offers. Employees also may get information by attending upcoming benefits sessions in March and April; by calling each insurance plan’s toll-free number listed in the mailing; by visiting the UC Human Resources/Benefits website or by contacting the UC Human Resources Transition Office at 514-1100 or by email at (hrtransition@hr.ucsf.edu).

Source: Bill Gordon, News Services

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