Brooklyn Hospitals Become One Big System After 'Trauma' Of Horrible Leadership, Finances

This piece is written by Kings County Politics in partnership with Patch:

BED-STUY, BROOKLYN — Bed-Stuy's Interfaith Medical Center at 1545 Atlantic Ave. will merge with Central Brooklyn’s Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center and Wyckoff Heights Medical Center into a single healthcare system.

The move, which was discussed last night and an Interfaith emergency meeting, is part of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposed plan to help save the ailing Brooklyn healthcare system by cutting costs and increasing revenue.

The consolidation comes following a Northwell Health Ventures study that found these hospitals are projected to cost the state a combined $1.7 billion dollars through the year 2021.

The hospitals that are expected to merge either chose to remain independent of other hospitals, tried but failed to enter into partnerships or entered into arrangements that never worked out for them, according to the Northwell study.

"Simply stated, these hospitals have undergone a decade of financial and organizational trauma," the report says.

"Recognizing that there is a lack of access to physicians and primary care services throughout the community, these parts of the community were described as healthcare deserts," said Northwell Executive Vice President Jeff Kraut. "Not only could you not find a physician, but sometimes there wouldn't be pharmacies or other access to services here. The needs for the hospitals is not only to provide good clinical care, but for all of them to remain as a community hospital that were founded on meeting the social needs of a community."

The study results, that were released late last year, proposed specific recommendations for restructuring and consolidating the hospitals into one healthcare network. The recommendations include: establish an independent, unified, mirror board governance structure over all the hospitals, appoint systemwide management and clinical leadership, and develop a shared services infrastructure, develop a large, geographically dispersed ambulatory care network, regionalize clinical programs and restructure inpatient services among the hospital campuses, create a safe environment in which to provide care, create an enterprise-wide information technology platform and develop a managed care contracting entity.

A significant component in the plan is adding 36 primary and ambulatory care units in order to decrease the amount of unnecessary emergency room visits, according to the Daily News.

The state set out funds back in 2015 in the form of $700 million as part of the Kings County Health Care Facility Transformation Program, "to help transform the delivery and of health care services as part of a merger, consolidation, acquisition or other significant corporate restructuring to create a more financially sustainable system of care," according to the report.

City Council Member Robert Cornegy Jr., who represents Bedford-Stuyvesant and northern Crown Heights, said the merger is an opportunity to realize the potential of not only Interfaith, but of the entire network to be an economic development driver for the communities in which the new healthcare network operates.

"There are hundreds of millions of dollars done at Interfaith on contracts and [this merger] is making sure that those contracts are part of the life blood of the community that the hospital caters to. So I see the implementation of the network as a possibility to go almost to a billion dollars in contracts in those communities," Cornegy said. "Where health institutions work best is where they are integrated in the community as economic drivers. I don't want to miss an opportunity for these communities to be part of an economic boom."

The proposed plan is expected to save the state $117 million dollars by 2021. So far, Brookdale and Interfaith hospitals have held their emergency meetings on the proposed plan. The plan is expected to be finalized by the end of the year with the project taking several years to complete.

"This is a collaborative effort this is something that people have done in other parts of the country and so therefore, we have an opportunity to do something great to revitalize the healthcare system within the central Brooklyn community and working in partnership with others," said Former Assembly member and Democratic district leader Annette Robinson. "I think this could be something good for us. We have to strike while the iron is hot because we don’t know what healthcare is going to look like nationally, but we do have money being allocated from the state of New York."

On February 22, the Request For Proposal (RFP) will be released, which will outline the exact plan for the project.

Lead photo via Interfaith Medical Center