Redeeming trust

Leona Helmsley’s fortune is dramatically improving health care in the Midwest

By Tom Dennis

This is an Only in America story, and it starts with the late Leona Helmsley, the hotel-chain owner whom millions of Americans knew as “the Queen of Mean.”

It ends with … what?

Maybe “the Queen of Dreams.” To Greg Kotschwar, the new nickname for Helmsley would be appropriate, because the Nebraska deputy sheriff is among some hundreds of Midwesterners who are alive today likely because of the charity Helmsley endowed in her will.

On Halloween night in 2015, Kotschwar had a heart attack in his home. The ambulance crew found him unresponsive.

Luckily, thanks to a $67 million effort by the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the ambulance – along with every other ambulance in a seven-state area, including North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota – had advanced lifesaving gear. One vital piece was a LUCAS 2 automatic CPR machine.

The crew would need it, as the machine wound up delivering chest compressions to Kotschwar for an hour.

“It’s my understanding that they did use the LUCAS machine throughout the whole situation, and there’s no doubt in my mind that that’s one of the main reasons I’m sitting here talking to you today,” Kotschwar says in a UND Center for Rural Health video.

“I’m so thankful – to see the sun come up, to see the snow on the ground. Just everything you took for granted before is special.”

New chapter

Helmsley herself was an American original. Born poor, died rich (after marrying real-estate tycoon Harry Helmsley), earned nationwide notoriety for the imperious way she treated staff … if you’re interested in her life, you might start with the TV movie about her that starred Suzanne Pleshette. It was titled, “Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean.”

But it’s after her death in 2007 that the new Helmsley chapter begins. Helmsley left the bulk of her $5 billion estate to the Helmsley Charitable Trust. Among those hearing the news was Walter Panzirer, a South Dakotan who’d just finished up a stint as a Mitchell, S.D., police officer – and who, as a grandson from Leona’s first marriage, was named in the will as one of the charity’s trustees.

“When my grandmother died, it was totally a surprise,” Panzirer told Prairie Business.

“It was none of my business what she was going to do with her money; it’s her money, she earned it. So I was shocked to see that she’d made me a trustee, and then humbled to see she’d given the trustees discretion on what to do.”

In life, the Helmsleys had given millions to hospitals. So, health care should be a key focus of the trust, the trustees decided.

Panzirer, who still lives in South Dakota, suggested one subcategory: rural health care. “Living in a rural state, I knew it was underserved,” he said. “Equipment was very dated, especially in the rural hospitals. You were looking at CT machines, if they had them at all, that sometimes were very poor quality.”

A study confirmed that the upper Midwest had received just 1.3 percent of all charitable donations for health care in 2007. So the New York-based Helmsley trust, which wound up supporting health care projects worldwide, opened its one and only branch office in an office park in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Now it’s 2017, and the trust’s rural-health arm already has given $321 million to improve rural health care across seven states. The states are North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana, and “we are the largest private funder of health-related initiatives in those states,” said Shelley Stingley, the trust’s program director in Sioux Falls.

The trust first identifies a problem, then sets out to solve it. Mission: Lifeline was one early effort. Through that program, the trust ensured every ambulance in the seven states has a 12-lead electrocardiograph.

The technology saves transport time, because it tells paramedics right away to speed the patient to advanced cardiac care. As a result, the percentage of heart attack victims in South Dakota who get advanced care within 90 minutes has risen from 58 percent to 93 percent, the American Heart Association has reported.

That’s a 35 percent jump in the number of potential lives saved.

eCare Telemedicine

In Unity Medical Center’s emergency room in Grafton, N.D. – and, thanks to Helmsley, in the ERs of most other rural hospitals in the region – a red box with a button sits on the wall. When a stroke, heart attack, serious accident or other complicated case comes in, a Unity staffer punches the button, and right away gets connected with Avera Health’s eCare telemedicine center in Sioux Falls.

Via cameras and screens, Avera can see Unity, and Unity can see Avera. “If you remember Mission Control from the old space shots, that’s my vision of the Avera end of this thing,” said Alan O’Neil, Unity’s CEO.

“They’ve got a whole team of people, all monitoring different aspects of the care that’s being delivered here. Physicians, nurses, pharmacists – they’re like right in the cockpit with you.”

The high-level support, available 24/7, helps Unity staff not only deliver better care but also avoid burnout, O’Neil said. “And we would not have been able to do it without the Helmsley Charitable Trust.”

Speaking of ERs, you’ll travel long and far before you find one as fascinating as the Simulation in Motion-North Dakota version. Because this ER – actually, a mock-up of an ER, along with a mock-up of an ambulance – is in the back of a truck.

So are lifelike mannequins that can breathe, talk, cough, bleed, be intubated, be catheterized, give birth and even “die” on command.

North Dakota now has four such trucks. They’re stationed in the state’s four corners, and when they travel to rural hospitals and fire stations, the realistic training they provide to EMS crews is invaluable, said Amy Malheim, SIM-ND program director.

By the way, South Dakota, Nebraska and Montana have similar fleets of trucks. Minnesota, Iowa and Wyoming are slated to get them, too.

Fully equipped, the trucks cost $750,000 each.

Thank you, Queen of Dreams.

“The genius of our philanthropic tradition is that it takes people just as they are — kind impulses, selfish impulses, confusions and wishes and vanities of all sorts swirling together in the usual human jumble — and it helps us do wondrous things, despite our flaws.”

Grant Smith Philanthropy magazine, Spring 2017

Tom Dennis EDITOR, PRAIRIE BUSINESS 701.780.1276