You trust that every decision about your care is made because it is the safest one - not because it is the cheapest.

Hospitals hold a unique place in society. They are not merely businesses that sell a service; they are institutions entrusted with the preservation of human life.

That is why the public should care deeply when the interests guiding a hospital begin to shift.

Those of us who work in medicine enter it with one overriding obligation: to provide the safest, highest-quality care we can. When a nurse manager asks for another nurse, or a physician requests an MRI, another day in the ICU, or a specialist consult, it is because their training and experience tell them those resources will improve a patient's chance of a good outcome.

Our success is measured by a single question: Did the patient receive safe, appropriate
care?

Hospital administrators answer to healthcare corporation executives and have a different focus. They must remain profitable and operate efficiently. Those goals matter - every hospital must manage its resources responsibly. The trouble begins when financial priorities outweigh clinical realities. When decisions about patient care are made primarily through the lens of budgets, outsourcing, and labor costs, the people at the bedside are left to manage the consequences.
Patients assume the risk. Clinicians inherit the liability.

For more than seventy years, Memorial Hospital has been one of Chattanooga's cornerstone institutions, and many of us have been proud to call it our professional home. Over the past several years, following its acquisition by CommonSpirit Health, we have watched with growing concern.

Long-established physician groups have departed. Specialty practices have been eliminated. Services have been cut and outsourcing has expanded. Respected physicians, some of them national leaders who helped build Memorial's reputation, have left the organization, the community entirely, while echoing the same concerns and frustrated by inaction.

Any one of these changes might be explained as routine restructuring. Together, they point to a broader transformation in how care is delivered - one that we believe has quietly reduced the resources available to provide the level of care this community expects.

The most urgent example is unfolding now.

In February, CommonSpirit moved to replace Diagnostic Imaging Consultants- the local radiology group that had served Memorial for decades, with Apollo Radiology, a remote teleradiology company based in India. In the days following the June 17, 2026 transition, clinicians report serious radiology delays, technical failures affecting access to imaging, and workflow breakdowns. Internal communications from administration acknowledge a substantial imaging backlog and have directed staff to prioritize certain patients, divert imaging to outside facilities, and have non-radiologists perform preliminary "wet reads."

Clinicians describe "STAT" emergency scans taking up to six hours to be interpreted, inpatient studies on deteriorating patients taking more than a day, and a troubling rise in vague, inconclusive reports-along with diagnostic errors they fear have already misguided patient care in some cases.

Timely imaging is fundamental to emergency and inpatient medicine. A CT scan can be the difference between emergency surgery and observation. An MRI can reveal whether permanent neurological injury is occurring. A chest CT can catch a life-threatening clot.

When those reads are delayed or unreliable, treatment is delayed: strokes go untreated, internal bleeding goes unrecognized, and patients are sent home who should have stayed.

These are not hypothetical risks. They are the predictable consequences when one of a hospital's most critical services cannot consistently deliver.

Why don't the people best positioned to sound the alarm speak up more loudly?

Not because they don't care, but because they have mortgages, families, licenses, and careers built over decades, and they fear retaliation. The result is a dangerous silence - the very expertise that should protect patients is the expertise most effectively muzzled.

So we ask, on behalf of this community: Has the relentless pursuit of cost-cutting - stripping clinical operations while administrative overhead grows - compromised the reliability and safety of one of the most essential medical services in our region?

The citizens of Chattanooga deserve answers. They deserve objective data comparing imaging turnaround times before and after the transition, and an independent review of the reported failures.

We call on Chattanooga's journalists, elected officials, regulators, and community leaders to examine these events. Review the data. Talk to physicians, nurses, radiology staff, and patients.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads. If these concerns prove unfounded, transparency will restore public confidence. If they prove well-founded, corrective action cannot wait.

Hospitals keep two balance sheets - one measures dollars, the other measures human
lives. The second must always come first.

- Frontline clinicians of Memorial Hospital

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Sherri Crawford

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We eventually got back in the treatment area and she had X-rays and various scans done. Her diagnosis was she had two broken vertebra in the lumbar of her spine and she had been sitting for hours in this painful situation awaiting treatment Once they saw how distressed her situation was with fractures of her back things started to get better with her care.