Hospital’s death is a rebirth

Riverside Health Care System administrators have worked out a plan with state officials to close the Community Hospital at Dobbs Ferry this year yet keep the renamed facility operating at full staff as an innovative “hybrid” model for health care delivery in Westchester County”™s river towns.

The agreement, recently announced in Dobbs Ferry by state Health Commissioner Richard J. Daines, followed a more than year-long community lobbying effort to keep open the 50-bed hospital after the state Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century, commonly known as the Berger Commission, recommended its closing in late 2006. Under the plan, details of which are still being planned by hospital and state officials, the community hospital will give back to the state its 50 certified beds and be absorbed by St. John”™s Riverside Hospital in Yonkers. Renamed the Dobbs Ferry Pavilion, the hospital will continue to operate within the integrated Riverside Health Care System Inc., a six-facility health care delivery system that includes St. John”™s Riverside.

At no time will the Dobbs ferry complex physically close during the transition, said James Foy, CEO and president of St. John”™s Riverside Hospital and Riverside Health Care System Inc. He said the transition will be carried out over the next six months.

The Dobbs Ferry hospital has about 170 employees. “There will be people moving into different jobs, but we don”™t believe there will have to be one layoff,” Foy said.

St. John”™s will transfer about a dozen inpatient beds to the 21-year-old Dobbs Ferry facility for use in private rooms, Foy said. Under the plan, the Ashikari Comprehensive Breast Center, which treats more than 6,000 women a year in Dobbs Ferry, will add a fourth full-time physician and purchase its own magnetic resonance imaging equipment, he said.

State health officials said the Ashford Avenue facility”™s emergency department, which averages about 9,000 visits yearly, will continue to operate. The transferred beds will be used for observation of patients with a focus on primary care, cancer care and management of chronic conditions to reduce hospitalizations, they said.

Adopting another Berger Commission recommendation for alternative health care delivery systems, the Dobbs Ferry Pavilion will be the launch pad for a five-year demonstration project in Westchester”™s river towns. State health officials said the project is designed as a three-point program of integrated primary care in the emergency room, care management of chronic disease and improved access to integrated breast cancer treatment for minority populations. The project model, aimed at reducing “inappropriate” emergency room visits and hospital admissions, could be expanded to neighboring communities in a couple of years, state health officials said.

“Except in rural areas, New York has no financially viable health care delivery models that tailor services to target the needs of communities,” Commissioner Daines said. “We need to shift the focus from institution-based planning to patient-centered delivery systems. This Rivertowns community presents an optimal forum to test an alternative model for health care: It”™s a small community where health outcomes can be monitored and improvements can be measured.”

Had the Dobbs Ferry facility closed as recommended by the state commission, “That would have been catastrophic,” Foy said. “Our elected officials really stepped up to the plate” to keep it open.
Foy, as well as Community Hospital of Dobbs Ferry CEO Ronald J. Corti and hospital board chairman Gregory M. Fisk, especially praised state Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, D- 35th District, for leading the effort in Albany. “Andrea Cousins made it her cause,” Foy said. “She spends her time getting the facts straight”¦The governor listened to her.”

Senator Stewart-Cousins called it “the right decision” by the state “because there is a clear and demonstrated need for an emergency room and a primary health-care facility in the Rivertowns part of Westchester.” She added, “ This will also allow St. John”™s hospital to continue to operate the many health care services it offers to the many low-income patients it serves in Yonkers.“

Foy said a $7 million state start-up grant for the changeover will be used in part to pay off the Community Hospital”™s $10 million long-term debt to St. John”™s Riverside.

The financial impact of the merger on St. John”™s Riverside is “at worst neutral,” he said. “Depending on how we work it out, we may be able to turn it into a positive.”

The recent announcement by immediately triggered one positive: A wealthy supporter of the community”™s effort to keep the facility open donated $150,000 to St. John”™s Riverside on the same day the Dobbs Ferry hospital was given a renewed lease on life. The anonymous donor pledged $200,000 more, Foy said.