Scarpino: “Care will be governed locally…”
KINGSTON — “Try not to think about the buildings, forget about
the bricks and mortar,” Health Alliance President David Scarpino
told the Ulster County Chamber of Commerce on Thursday. His morning address
discussed the future of the HAHV, which owns Kingston and Benedictine
Hospitals.
Westchester Medical Center is accepting HAHV under their umbrella, Scarpino said. It’s not an acquisition.
“This is an affiliation where the Westchester will have a board, more likely than not, that will have some authority and control and some powers over the Health Alliance Board,” he said. “The Health Alliance Board will still be intact; it will be driving many of the decisions we make on a regular basis, the executives of the hospital will run it. Care will be governed locally but coordinated within a greater region,” he said.
Some partnership delays with Westchester have occurred, due to DSRIP bureaucracy, Delivery System Reform Incentive Payments, which is the newfangled state funding mechanism designed to slim down costs.
“We were supposed to be done with a letter of intent by March 31st, or thereabouts; we thought we were going to be finished,” Scarpino said. “Westchester asked for an extension on that, because there was so much going on,” he added. “Things are moving along very briskly.”
Saint Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie was acquired by Westchester Medical Center last spring, which bogged the group down in red tape. It is now called MidHudson Regional Hospital.
Future DSRIP grant applications, submitted through Westchester, will help fund the closure of Kingston Hospital campus on Broadway, and build entirely new emergency room, intensive care unit, and maternity ward on the Benedictine campus at Mary’s Avenue. The entire building will be completely renovated, and transplant services will be added, Scarpino said.
“Forget about what happens to this campus or that campus,” Scarpino said. “It’s really how do we together, in a collaborative process, each and every one of us who provides care in this community, do it in a way that we truly make outcomes better,” he said.
The financially struggling hospital group has no choice. Strict state rules require one of the hospitals to close, and federal regulators are downsizing the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement scheme. “We’re going to be measured in our future based on doing better, not more,” Scarpino noted. “This is the corner we have to turn in health care.”
