Health Alliance president touts ‘medical village’
SAUGERTIES, N.Y. » More than 100 people filled the community room at the senior center in Saugerties for a forum about affordable health care, organized by left-wing activist group Indivisible.
The keynote speaker at the Monday evening event was David Scarpino, chief executive officer of HealthAlliance of the Hudson Valley, which owns and operates several local hospitals, including the Mary’s Avenue and Broadway campuses in Midtown Kingston.
Scarpino’s hourlong talk covered a wide variety of issues, including the proposed “medical village” in Kingston, HeathAlliance’s affiliation with Westchester Medical Center Health Network and the controversies surrounding Empire BlueCross BlueShield and the Medicare reimbursement rate.
Scarpino, warmly received by the crowd, became the leader of HealthAlliance in 2013 after serving as its chief financial officer since 2009.
During his tenure as president and CEO, Scarpino said, HealthAlliance has navigated complicated mergers, consolidations and institutional realignments, culminating with an ambitious $133.6 million redevelopment proposal for the Mary’s Avenue Campus, formerly known as Benedictine Hospital. The deal represents one of the largest investment projects in city history.
HealthAlliance plans to construct a new 110,000-square-foot wing and tower at the Mary’s Avenue Campus and renovate and remodel an additional 70,000 square feet of the campus. Construction is expected to be completed about two years after it starts, Scarpino told the audience. The hospital is waiting for approval from the state Department of Health before it starts construction.
The Broadway Campus, formerly Kingston Hospital, is to become a medical village, a regional health and quality-of-life hub providing primary and behavioral-health care, along with conventional and integrative health and human services. That work is expected to start about midway through the Mary’s Avenue Campus project.
Scarpino said he supports the medical village idea so deeply that HealthAlliance plans to launch a virtual pilot model, with community members helping to decide how best the hospital can meet community health and human service needs.
“The most important piece is we will be working with informal community leaders,” he said. “We will bring in groups to talk about how they can help us improve their care, access and quality of life.”
O+, the local arts festival that lets artists exchange their contributions to festival programming for free health and wellness services, will be involved, as will faith groups and the immigrant community, Scarpino said.
“When you start to have conversations with those leaders in their communities, they are the ones that can get people to come to us,” he said.
He said HealthAlliance is here “to improve the quality of health in our community, number one. And also, to make sure there is access to quality providers in the community.”
Keeping people out of the hospital, while counterintuitive, is a major institutional goal, Scarpino said. This concept dovetails with the problem of limited funding and the goal overall cost reduction.
Central to such discussions is the Medicare reimbursement rate, which is significantly lower in Ulster County than in Dutchess and all other counties south to Staten Island, Scarpino said.
The lower reimbursement rate means HealthAlliance often can’t afford salaries as high as those offered by hospitals in neighboring counties, Scarpino said.
A nurse working at HealthAlliance can make $12 to $20 an hour more by moving across the Hudson river, Scarpino said. He said trainees often move on after cutting their teeth at HealthAlliance.
Ulster County Legislator Chris Allen from Saugerties spoke of his efforts to lobby for an equalization of reimbursement rates, describing conversations he held with U.S. Rep. John
Faso, R-Kinderhook. Allen said Faso told him of similar concerns elsewhere in the 19th Congressional District. Scarpino described the problem as political in nature and said he would strive to keep his own toes out of the political water, remarking that 70 percent of hospital funding comes from the state and federal governments.
The 14-month impasse between Health Alliance and Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield was briefly addressed. Scarpino accused the insurance company of breaking agreements with Westchester Medical.
The impasse has left Empire’s members, including many Ulster County government
employees, without coverage for inpatient services at the two hospitals
in Kingston.
The matter currently is in litigation.