Long-term care drops to 28 beds after Elyria/Lorain/Cleveland consolidation

AMHERST – The county`s main health care systems will merge their long-term, acute-care services into a single facility at Amherst Hospital, hospital officials said Monday.

Within the next four weeks, EMH Regional Medical Center, Community Health Partners and Grace Hospital in Amherst – a Cleveland Clinic affiliate – will convert Grace Hospital into a single, long-term, acute-care facility called Specialty Hospital.

Grace Hospital already exists on the second floor of Amherst Hospital as a 20-bed, nonprofit facility that provides patients with long-term medical care, but the new plans call for Grace to be renamed and refurbished to accommodate 28 total beds, said Rajive Khanna, a Grace Hospital spokesman.

While Amherst Hospital is an arm of EMH, Grace Hospital and EMH have existed largely independent of each other, save for Grace paying EMH for use of the second-floor space in Amherst for the past 11 years, EMH officials said.

From CHP`s standpoint, the planned merger will result in CHP closing down Community Specialty Hospital, a 30-bed long-term care facility at St. Joseph`s Community Center, said Jennifer Kennedy, CHP spokeswoman.

That move will mean that the county`s total capacity for long-term, acute-care services from hospitals will drop by almost half – from 50 beds to 28 beds total.

Hospital officials said the decrease in long-term care opportunities – an inevitable result of the merger – will actually allow the hospitals to bolster services for patients who are in greatest need of long-term care.

“The main purpose for this is to provide the right level of care for the right patients,” Kennedy said, adding that the Amherst location was chosen because it was a central location for Lorain County residents.

Historically, Grace Hospital usually has about 16 of its 20 beds filled, while the CHP long-term facility usually has 25 of its 30 beds filled.

While the financial cost of revamping Grace Hospital to accommodate eight more beds appears to be little more than a footnote – installing a few new sinks and cosmetic details – officials at the hospitals said in a press release that the partnership will result in cost savings as they pool resources.

The patients who no longer qualify for long-term care in the 28 beds at the new facility can be absorbed by the area`s skilled nursing facilities, Kennedy said.

All this comes as long-term care facilities are facing increased scrutiny by the government in regard to the length of time patients stay, as well as the related Medicare reimbursements, said Ellen Griffith, spokeswoman at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Long-term care facilities typically receive higher Medicare reimbursements because patients` injuries and illnesses are much more serious, Griffith said.

As it were, long-term care patients must stay at the hospital for about 25 days under Medicare`s rules, but recent government studies have questioned whether many of those patients need to be enrolled in a long-term care facility, or if they could simply be placed in a nursing home, according to a study on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Webs site.

CHP will continue to honor its lease at St. Joseph`s Community Center through March 2010.

The new long-term care facility will employ 80 people, and any employees left over from the previous facilities after the merger will be placed in positions throughout any of the three hospitals, according to a press release.

Contact Shawn Foucher at (440) 653-6255 or sfoucher@chroniclet.com.
 

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