Mid-Atlantic Health Care is seeking approval for its first
major renovation project at Parkhouse, the nursing home it acquired from
Montgomery County for $41 million in March.
Melanie McGarry, administrator at the 467-bed skilled-care facility
in Royersford, Pa., said the $3 million project includes creating a short-term
stay unit that will feature nine private rooms with their own bathrooms and
showers. The project will also include, along with renovations to the lobby,
three rehabilitation gyms and one long-term care unit.
Dr. Scott Rifkin, president of Mid-Atlantic, said his
Maryland company plans to invest a total of $15 million to $20 million for
renovations and improvements at Parkhouse over the next 10 years.
The long-term improvements include refurbishing every unit
in the nursing home, creating more private rooms, and renovating the parking
lot. Rifkin said Mid-Atlantic has no plans to develop the surrounding 200 acres
that was part of the acquisition. He said they’d be willing to work with the
community in the future if there was a development idea that was needed and
they supported.
“We are looking to modernize all of our nursing homes not
just for today, but for what nursing homes will need to be 10 and 20 years from
now,” said Rifkin, whose company operates 16 skilled-care centers in
Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. It entered the Philadelphia market in 2011
by buying five facilities from NewCourtland.
“We want to help reduce health-care costs systemwide, not
just reduce nursing home costs. That will mean raising the level of acuity (or
level of illness) of who we can take care of,” he said.
Rifkin said his goal at Parkhouse and the company’s other
nursing homes is to build closer alliances with health systems, which are now
penalized by Medicare and some private insurers when patients discharged from
hospitals are re-admitted.
Mid-Atlantic has developed its own data-mining software, at
a cost of $1 million, to monitor the health status of, and care delivered to,
its residents. The system tracks 130 data points, gathered from the company
electronic medical records system, that cover everything from a resident’s
bowel movements to what percentage of a meal they ate to their vital signs.
“If we can see something early and intervene, we can prevent
somebody from having to be re-admitted to the hospital,” he said. “When
hospitals started getting dinged [by Medicare] for re-admissions, it had a big
impact on the nursing home industry.”
Rifkin said the re-admission rates at the Philadelphia
nursing homes it acquired were averaging around 45 percent, well above the
national average of 24 percent, when Mid-Atlantic took over. Those rates are
now averaging about 17 percent. McGarry said the data-mining will be integrated
into Parkhouse’s clinical operations over the next six months. She said one
change already instituted since the Mid-Atlantic acquisition is morning and
afternoon staff meetings in the facility’s “Criterion Room,” where any negative
changes in the health status of residents are discussed and a plan is developed
to address those changes.
“And accountability [for implementing the plan] is
assigned,” she said.
McGarry started working in the kitchen at Parkhouse more
than three decades ago but went on to become a nurse aide, nurse and
supervisor. She was named administrator 14 years ago.
“Our responsibility,” she said, “is to keep people at their
highest possible level.”
Another change Mid-Atlantic made at Parkhouse — which had
been owned and operated by the county for the past 76 years — was to bring in
Tender Touch out of Lakewood, N.J., as the new provider of physical, occupational
and speech therapy services to residents. McGarry said the number of Parkhouse
residents receiving therapy services has tripled to 135 from 45 since the
change.
Mid-Atlantic’s business model, Rifkin said, is to build
relationships with health systems and develop a reputation in the communities
they serve for delivering quality care in clean and modernized facilities so
their nursing homes stay full.
In today’s health-care environment, nursing homes aren’t
places people go for long stays. “About 95 percent of our patients do not come
to our facilities for long-term care,” he said. “They stay for two-to-four
weeks, then go home. The other 5 percent are long-term-care patients.”
Mid-Atlantic has 1,176 nursing home beds in Philadelphia,
which represents about one-fourth of nursing home beds in the city. Its
occupancy rate at its Philadelphia nursing homes is 98 percent.
“If you can keeps beds full, the economics can work,” Rifkin
said. “We don’t make huge profits [at any one facility], but we don’t expect
to.”
Source: Philadelphia
Business Journal
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