By any measure, health delivery in America is undergoing fundamental and disruptive change. It’s here, it’s big, and it can look scary.
Across the board, critical issues like primary care physician shortages, an aging population needing chronic care, the inability for small hospitals to enter credit markets to pay for expensive technology, among others, have converged to deteriorate the old model.
As hospitals close across the country, are privatized, or merge with larger health systems, what will the new model look like?
CEO and President of UM Shore Regional Health Ken Kozel visited Chestertown this week to address rumors that the Chestertown hospital is on the verge of closing, and to describe what might be on the horizon for health care on the Eastern Shore.
It isn’t familiar terrain.
The older model of a rural general hospital, one that offers a full spectrum of services from birth to chronic care in each hospital, is unsustainable.
What Kozel described was a re-evaluation of each hospitals “identity”—how it serves its local and regional population best. For example, specialized medicine like orthopedic surgery might best be located in Easton, while Chestertown might offer palliative care for chronic and acute pain. (These are only examples).
UM Shore Regional Health recently spent $4 million to rebuild its Emergency Department, a point underscored by Kozel, so it’s conceivable the Chestertown hospital will be modeled more after Queen Anne’s Emergency Center in Grasonville, a 14-bed facility that offers emergency care, primary care and specialty physician services.
As Kozel said, each UM Shore Regional Health facility can not be all things to all people.
All of this is an oversimplification of a complex, often life-critical issue, but in light the Spy’s continuing look at the changes in medical services on the Eastern Shore, the following exceptional article by Jayne O’Donnell and Laura Unger at USA Today is offered for your reading here.
Image is from USA Today.
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