by: John George Senior Reporter- Philadelphia Business Journal
Bucks County is getting its first stand-alone rehabilitation hospital.
St. Mary Medical Center plans to open a 50-bed, acute rehabilitation hospital in a partnership with Centerre Healthcare Corp. of Nashville, Tenn.
“We are always looking at community needs and what services we’ll need to be providing in the future,” said Greg Wozniak, president and CEO at St. Mary. “We saw the demand for rehab care was going to be a growing.”
Wozniak said the $20.5 million, rehab hospital will complement the St. Mary’s expanded programs in cardiology, neurosciences and orthopedics.
The construction cost for the rehab hospital will be shared by the two organizations.
St. Mary, part of Newtown Square-based Catholic Health East, decided to partner with Centerre Healthcare, he said, because it believed the company’s singular focus on clinical outcomes and quality was the best match for its goal of bringing the “highest level” of rehabilitation care to Bucks County.
Centerre Healthcare specializes developing and operating Rehabilitation Hospitals in partnership with leading Acute Care Hospitals.
Pat Foster, the company’s CEO, said St. Mary is his 12-year-old company’s 10th partner and second in Pennsylvania, where it already operates the 59-bed Lancaster Rehabilitation Hospital with Lancaster General Health.
Under the partnership, the 50 employees who now staff St. Mary’s inpatient rehabilitation-care department will become employees of Centerre Healthcare in the new hospital. Foster said he expects the hospital to expand to 150 employees “when we reach full capacity.”
The 55,000-square-foot medical center is being built on the other side of Newtown-Langhorne Road from St. Mary’s main campus in Langhorne on land formerly occupied by the Neshaminy Middle School.
The free-standing rehab hospital, expected to open next spring, will provide rehab services — physical, occupation and speech therapy along with neuropsychology --— for patients recovering from conditions such as spinal cord injuries, stroke, brain injuries trauma and orthopedic maladies.
Among its features will be therapy gyms; simulated home training environments an outdoor therapy courtyard that will have a putting green and basketball court, and walking path.
The hospital will have a self-contained, locked brain-injury unit to treat patients suffering from certain behavioral and/or cognitive issues that would put them at-risk in a less structured setting.
Lisa Haney, executive director of inpatient rehabilitation at St. Mary, said the opportunity to build a new hospital from scratch will allow it to create the best environments for the needs of all rehab patients — something that is not possible in the limited space the department has on the main campus.