Northeast Ohio hospitals in Columbiana, Erie, Holmes, Huron and Wayne counties joined a network of 25 hospitals across Ohio and West Virginia — the Ohio High Value Network (OHVN) — to pool their resources, share best practices and ensure their long-term viability amid rising costs and dropping reimbursement rates.
The OHVN, which includes hospitals serving 37 counties, 115 towns and more than 2.5 million patients, is the first step in a collaborative that is expected to grow over time, said Nate White, president and CEO of Cibolo Health, which helps manage the OHVN.
Providing such support for rural hospitals helps ensure they stay open, White said.
"There's literally hundreds of rural hospitals at risk of closing right now, today," he said. "And I think all of our members feel some sort of that pressure."
Beyond keeping these hospitals open, collaborations like this help ensure that these hospitals stay independent, which is important, said Thomas Campanella, professor emeritus of health economics at Baldwin Wallace University.
"The big advantage of an independent community hospital, they can uniquely focus on what's best for their community," he said. "The challenge sometimes when you're talking about hospitals, rural hospitals that are owned by big hospital systems, ultimately the big hospital system is driven by their particular needs and as it relates to referrals and those types of things. And sometimes the specific service needs or unique needs from social determinants of that community is not necessarily a high priority."
Keeping these rural hospitals open is also a matter of both public safety and the wellbeing of the local economy, said Carly Salamone of Vantage Healthcare of Ohio, which represents several of the hospitals in the OHVN. When a local, rural hospital closes, it can mean residents will have to drive many miles out of the way to get the care they need, she said.
“In emergencies, it could be life or death, right? Because if it took me 20 minutes to get to the hospital and I'm having a heart attack, and now it takes me an hour and a half, the likelihood of survival has significantly decreased in that time period," Salamone said.
When a rural hospital closes it can also be destructive for the local economy, she added.
"In rural communities, the hospital is the largest employer and the largest provider of health care services. And when rural hospitals close, you see massive numbers of unemployment," Salamone said. "If we don't have collaborative, then our rural independent hospitals are going to continue to close, and that's going to cause economic devastation in these rural communities."
