Thanks to a $900,000 grant Jefferson Hospital is looking forward to being able to expand its surgical suite, better track patients after being discharged to ensure they receive follow-up care, purchase dialysis equipment and support the opening of its intensive outpatient behavioral health services.
Jefferson is one of 10 hospitals recently awarded parts of a $9 million Georgia Department of Community Health (DCH) grant designed to support services that strengthen access to quality care in underserved communities.
“Our goal is to reduce the number of rural hospital closures that may be a result of financial stress,” said DCH Commissioner Caylee Noggle. “Through a formal request for grant application process, Georgia is demonstrating its commitment to rural regions working to close healthcare gaps, and to rural Georgians who are disproportionately affected by poor health outcomes, partially due to lack of access to care.”
This is the third year in a row that Jefferson Hospital has received a Rural Hospital Stabilization Grant, but this is the first time in that period that it took part in a competitive bidding process to receive those funds.
In the two previous phases of the program the hospital received at total of around $1 million. Those funds have been used to remodel the hospital’s specialty clinic, open the inpatient behavioral health unit, support its hospitalist implementation and launch a care coordination and wellness program in its clinics.
Jefferson Hospital CEO Wendy Martin said the biggest portion of this most recent grant, just under $400,000, will be used to replace towers, scopes, surgical cameras and other equipment in the operating room.
“We’ve added a tower so they don’t have to move equipment back and forth between the OR rooms and these towers, which include the computers and monitors that attach to the scopes, will give us the ability to add more specialty services,” Martin said. “They open us up to do more, do it faster and more efficiently.”
Surgical volume is up at Jefferson Hospital since the COVID pandemic shut down many elective procedures.
“Right now, on an average week we have a mix of surgeries and scopes, six or seven,” Martin said.
Jefferson Hospital’s OR sees mostly outpatient procedures like endoscopies, colonoscopies, gall bladder surgeries, cyst removals, hernia repair, light lesion and tumor removal.
A significant portion of the grant will be used to purchase dialysis equipment to be used on an in-patient basis.
“It’s a service line that is generally very expensive to do,” Martin said. “You have to have a nephrologist and the right staff to do it.”
The hospital plans to purchase a new dialysis system that can be wheeled into a patient’s room right up to the bed. During the pandemic, the hospital had several patients who were admitted for other conditions, but who needed short-term dialysis treatments.
“Every hospital was full,” Martin said. “There was just nowhere for them to go. I don’t ever want to be in that situation again. We won’t be keeping acute renal failure patients. Anyone in crisis is too sick for us. But patients who need dialysis over the next two or three days, we’re going to be able to keep those patients.”
The grant will also support expanding the hospital’s wellness care coordination program that tracks patients after they are discharged to ensure that they are getting follow-up visits with their primary care doctors.
Just like the last two Rural Hospital Stabilization grants, Martin said that a portion of these funds will also be used in the hospital's new behavioral health unit, specifically this time to offset expenses later this month as the hospital opens its intensive outpatient program.
“The Rural Hospital Stabilization Grant has been a huge help to rural hospitals all across Georgia,” Martin said. “There are so many things, like the OR equipment upgrades, that we would likely not have been able to do without something like this. And it opens up so many opportunities to expand our services down the road.”
DCH established this grant program in 2014 to address the unique challenges facing rural hospitals in Georgia and since then has awarded more than $39 million in funding.
“This program has become an integral part in stabilizing our rural hospitals and sustaining their viability,” said Stephen Foster, the Executive Director of DCH’s State Office of Rural Health. “Through these and other critical resources, we are building the right partnerships and helping to strengthen Georgia’s healthcare program to meet the complex needs of rural communities.”