In an effort to alleviate the growing—and costly—problem of patient rehospitalizations, skilled nursing and rehabilitation care provider Genesis HealthCare is partnering with Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Bayview campus in a $20 million project that will address this issue specifically.
The announcement comes just days before new rehospitalization penalties are set to begin kicking in on October 1 for hospitals receiving a certain threshold of patients from post-acute care settings within 30 days of a previous hospitalization.
The project, funded through cash and non-cash contributions, will comprise a near 50%-50% partnership among the two entities. The venture could foreshadow other partnerships between skilled nursing providers and hospitals, potentially changing the face of the senior care industry as health care reform initiatives take effect.
This particular initiative is set in a facility that has been repurposed several times and today has 115 patients rather than the 255 it formerly served, including 40 post-acute skilled nursing patients but few historic long term care patients.
Housed in a facility of the Johns Hopkins campus, the program has several long-term goals, the Bayview medical campus’s president Dr. Richard Bennett told attendees of the National Investment Center for the Seniors Housing and Care Industry (NIC) annual conference held in Chicago last week.
Those goals: to support ongoing health care reform, to grow hospital programs tied to post-acute skilled nursing care for services like joint replacement and stroke, and to develop faculty-led speciality programs in areas such as dementia and late stroke rehabilitation.
“Health care reform will drive new partnership formation,” Bennett said in his presentation. “There are win-win strategies that can be crafted between disparate cultures and new business models must be envisioned to meet the aim of better health care and lower costs.”
The problem is receiving attention across health care providers and the continuum of care, said Dr. David Gifford of the American Health Care Association Senior Vice President, Quality and Regulatory Affairs.
“Hospitals really care about SNFs,” Gifford said. “It used to be because they could discharge patients and then make more money. Now they are looking to lower rehospitalization rates. They want to know where to send patients. If you don’t have lower rehospitalization rates, they are going to send patients elsewhere.”
Written by Elizabeth Ecker
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