Business Review: Why St. Peter’s Plans to Merge 2 Hospitals

The Albany Business Review recently published a story on SPHP’s plan to merge Albany Memorial Hospital and Samaritan Hospital for regulatory and compliance reasons.

From the article:

The changes are to respond to federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services guidelines issued in 2017. The guidelines say in order for hospitals to qualify for Medicare payments, their primary purpose has to be providing inpatient care.

Albany Memorial Hospital meets that definition for now, but it has been seeing fewer inpatient visits. In 2016, the hospital had an average occupancy of 41 patients on a given day. By 2018, that number had dropped to the high teens, said Michael Finegan, president of acute care for St. Peter’s.

Some of that decrease has to do with sending patients to its other hospitals as needed, Finegan said, while some of it is because patients in general are using more outpatient care.

“More and more, we have a proliferation of urgent care alternatives. There’s retail medicine popping up in communities all over the Capital Region,” Finegan said. “We need to rethink how we position ourselves best to serve the community.”

Click here to read the full article.