As business and civic leaders toured Burke Rehabilitation’s newly expanded Purchase/Fairfield Outpatient Therapy site in Purchase Professional Park on Thursday, Sept. 12, Joe Simone — president of Simone Development Cos., which owns the medical office complex — talked about the difference between life span and health span, particularly for boomers. You may live a long life, he said, but what about its quality? The Burke Rehabilitation Purchase/Fairfield locale is all about health span, he added — an idea that reverberated throughout the morning presentation and even before.
The $1.2 million outpatient facility — which opened in 2002 as the first of Burke’s 13 sites beyond the 150-bed White Plains campus, part of the Montefiore Health System — will almost double the number of visits a year from 8,000 to up to 15,000 in a space that has grown from 1,400 square feet to 5,132. The expansion, which took six months, is a game-changer, Burke Executive Director Scott Edelman, CPA, MBA, CFE, told the Westfair Business Journal. And it’s crucial for the strategically located facility, bridging as it does Greenwich and Westchester County off I-287.
To demonstrate that nexus, Edelman and Simone were joined by Greenwich Selectwoman Lauren Rabin and Select-person Janet Stone McGuigan as well as New York State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, State Sen. Shelley Mayer, Assembly-members Chris Burdick and Steven Otis, Westchester Deputy County Executive Ken Jenkins, Westchester County Board of Legislators Chairman Vedat Gashi and Legislator Benjamin Boykin, along with Steven Tisser, vice president of outpatient services at Burke.
The site offers a range of specialized treatments, including vestibular therapy for balance issues, sports medicine and rehabilitation, concussion management, orthopedic medicine and rehabilitation, physical therapy and lymphedema care.
Founded in 1915, Burke has long been one of the go-to places for preventive and postoperative therapy worldwide. In 2023, it served more than 2,900 inpatients and had more than 155,000 outpatient visits, growing its total operating revenue to $127 million. (Among its recent innovations — an intensive Comprehensive Aphasia Program for those who can no longer understand and express language and an expanded Neurologic Music Therapy program.)
Its reputation as a rehab mecca has also made it difficult to get into. But Edelman told us that is not Burke’s doing. “I always have room at the inn,” he said. Rather its insurance companies looking to save money by sending people to skilled nursing facilities. Edelman himself, a Hudson Valley resident who’s been with Burke for 31 years, is not just a Burke leader. He’s a former patient — shoulder, hip, knee and ankle.
“My wife says I’m almost tolerable after my weekend warrior men’s basketball games,” he joked to the audience.
Indeed, it became a kind of meme of the event to hear which speaker had been a Burke patient and which might someday be. (Boykin said he’d be on the phone to Burke right after his Sept. 18 knee surgery at White Plains Hospital.)
The meme of Burke connections among the speakers turned serious as Mayer said, “My brother-in-law’s life was saved by Burke during Covid.”
Health is also our wealth, some speakers noted. It’s more economical to be an outpatient than an inpatient, Burdick said. Similarly, Gashi said, it’s better to have office buildings repurposed and filled so they can stay on the tax rolls.
Ultimately, health is about living well. “Burke,” Edelman said, “means hope.”
