Rural hospital closures affect access to care
Since 2005, 163 rural hospitals have closed in the United States. When rural hospitals close, the situation for hospitalists and other physicians is different. In communities where a larger health system owns a hospital, such as when Vidant Health closed Pungo District Hospital in Belhaven, N.C., in 2014 before reopening a nonemergency clinic in the area in 2016, health care services for the community may have limited interruption.
However, if there isn’t a nearby system to join, many doctors will end up leaving the area. More than half of rural hospitals that close end up not providing any kind of supplementary health care service, according to the NC Rural Health Research Program.
“A lot of the hospitals that have closed have not been owned by a system,” said George H. Pink, PhD, deputy director of the NC Rural Health Research Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They’ve been independent, freestanding, and that perhaps is one of the reasons why they’re closing, is because they haven’t been able to find a system that would buy them out and inject capital into the community.”
This can also have an effect on the number of health care providers in the area, Dr. Pink said. “Their ability to refer patients and treat patients locally may be affected. That’s why, in many towns where hospitals have closed, we see a drop in the number of providers, particularly primary care doctors who actually live in the community.”
Politicians and federal entities have proposed a number of solutions to help protect rural hospitals from closure. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Sen. Cory Gardener (R-Colo.) have sponsored bills in the Senate, while Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) has introduced legislation in the House. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has proposed two models of rural hospital care, and there are additional models proposed by the Kansas Hospital Association. A pilot program in Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Rural Health Model, is testing how a global budget by CMS for all inpatient and hospital-based outcomes might help rural hospitals.
“What we haven’t had a lot of action on is actually testing these models out and seeing whether they will work, and in what kinds of communities they will work,” Dr. Pink said.
Hospitalists as community advocates
Dr. D’Mello, who wrote an article for the Journal of Hospital Medicine on Hahnemann’s ownership by a private equity firm (doi: 10.12788/jhm.3378), said that the inherent nature of a for-profit entity trying to make a hospital profitable is a bad sign for a hospital and not necessarily what is in the best interest for an academic institution or for doctors who train there.
“I don’t know if I could blame the private equity firm completely, but in retrospect, the private equity firms stepping in was like the death knell of the hospital,” he said of Hahnemann’s closure.
“I think what the community needs to know – what the health care community, patient community, the hospitalist community need to know – is that there’s got to be more attention paid to these types of issues during mergers and acquisitions to prevent this from happening,” Dr. Pinsky said.
One larger issue was Hahnemann’s position as a safety net hospital, which partly played into American Academic’s lack of success in making the hospital as profitable as they wanted it to be, Dr. D’Mello noted. Hahnemann’s patient population consisted mostly of minority patients on Medicare, Medicaid, and charity care insurance, while recent studies have shown that hospitals are more likely to succeed when they have a larger proportion of patients with private insurance.
“Studies show that, to [make more] money from private insurance, you really have to have this huge footprint, because then you’ve got a better ability to negotiate with these private insurance companies,” Dr. D’Mello said. “Whether that’s actually good for health care is a different issue.”
Despite their own situations, it is not unusual for hospitalists and hospital physicians to step up during a hospital closure and advocate for their patients on behalf of the community, Dr. Pink said.
“When hospitals are in financial difficulty and there’s the risk of closure, typically, the medical staff are among the first to step up and warn the community: ‘We’re at risk of losing our service. We need some help,’ ” he said. “Generally speaking, the local physicians have been at the forefront of helping to keep access to hospital care available in some of these small communities – unfortunately, not always successfully.”
Dr. D’Mello, Dr. Pinsky, and Dr. Pink report no relevant conflicts of interest.
