“If you live in the Hudson Valley and you have surgery in the city and you’re hospitalized, that adds a degree of difficulty to your surgical experience, because if nothing else your friends and family have to commute three hours to visit you,” he said. “And if you’re going to have treatment or follow-up, you’re going to have to travel three hours down to the city. And it just adds to the stress and strain and aggravation. By being able to offer top-quality healthcare here in the Hudson Valley it’s just taking a lot of the stress out of it.”
How will these trends evolve in the future? Well, to begin with, said Hughes, local hospitals like Saint Francis are going to first have to figure out how to stay in business.
“We don’t know still the impact of affordable healthcare,” Hughes said. “Our two biggest customers as a hospital are Medicare and Medicaid, and reimbursements from same. Especially from Medicare. In recent years, those reimbursements have reduced, and there’s nothing going on in Washington that leads us to believe it’s going to be anything but a continuation of that in the future to the point where our annual budget includes anticipated reductions in reimbursements from Washington.”
Fostering more evolved local partnerships is one promising direction that might have advantages beyond the potential for savings. “The next two areas we want to build on and grow further are vascular surgery and neurosurgery and neurosciences,” Ping said. “That’s two areas where we still see a lot of patients leaving the area today and going north or south, and one of the things that we’ve done on the vascular surgery area is we’ve been working with the Vascular Group. They’re based in Albany, and they’re working with us on developing a vascular surgery program at Vassar to develop it as a regional referral program. We are trying to bring more neurosurgeons to the community. We’ve been in discussions with HealthAlliance in trying to jointly recruit. If both of us together were to recruit surgeons, we may attract an even higher quality of surgeon.”
