LONG BRANCH — Monmouth Medical Center has gained a competitive edge with a new emergency-room service dedicated to senior community members, Executive Director Frank Vozos said on Nov. 1.
“We dedicated a section of our emergency room to the senior population with specially trained nurses,” Vozos said at the medical center’s annual community meeting.
“This is a great thing for the senior population, and we believe this will provide a service that doesn’t exist in the area,” he said .
Vozos said during the medical center’s annual community meeting that the hospital administration is also discussing renovation and expansion projects, including renovating the postpartum rooms, expanding the robotic arm surgery program, and renovating some of the older areas of the building, which turns 125 next year.
He went on to say that because of competition among hospitals, Monmouth Medical has started to expand services beyond its Second Avenue location.
“One of the things we’ve done over the last couple of years is take a good look at our market and where our patients are coming from,” he said. “We know we’ve done very well with the immediate surrounding communities, but how well are we doing in the periphery?
“We decided that our next steps would be to expand our market and take services to the people,” he added. “We are continuously looking to expand our footprint.”
Vozos explained that there has been significant growth in locations affiliated with the hospital in the past two years.
“In 2009 there were one or two areas where we had a presence outside of Long Branch,” Vozos said. “In 2011 there are new facilities, some of them are physician’s practices, some of them are breast centers, lab stations, and some imaging.”
The hospital currently has locations in Colts Neck, Howell, Tinton Falls, West Long Branch and Middletown, as well as related private practices throughout the county.
According to Vozos, one reason for the branching out is that some specialty private practices are unable to survive on their own, while at the same time, the hospital is looking to bring in specialties to better serve patients.
“We are able to bring in some of the hard-to-find specialties,” Vozos said.
He said the hospital has gone through some financially rough times in recent years as the economy struggled, but things have improved in recent years.
“In 2007 and 2008 we were running negative margins, we did lose money, and in 2009 we turned it around and had a very good margin of 3 percent,” he said. “In 2007 and 2008 was when the economy was really bad, and we were not spared any of that pain.”
He said that the medical center’s operating margin is up to 6 percent in 2010 and at this point is up to almost 8 percent in 2011.
According to Vozos, charity care is a loss area for hospitals that provide health care for free to low-income patients, and this demographic has risen in the last two years.
“Our mission is to never turn away anybody who requires care,” he said. “Our total charity care in 2009 exceeded $17 million and of that, $7.2 million was subsidized by the state.
“In 2010 our charity care actually went up to over $19 million in care with the subsidy being about $8.5 million.”
He said losses due to charity care must be offset in other areas of the hospital that are profitable.
“You need to have profitable services elsewhere in the hospital to cover that, so that $11 million had to be made elsewhere,” he said.
Vozos said that inpatient visits are well above 17,000 this year as of September, which is an improvement over the same period in 2010.
He also said that emergency room visits are down due to a new initiative.
“Part of the explanation is through a grant, we took a look at all our patients that arrived in the emergency room that didn’t really need to be in our emergency room,” Vozos said. “They arrived there because they don’t have a primary care physician and didn’t know where to go.
“We started evaluating all the patients that came to our emergency room, and it was a significant number that could have benefited from having a primary physician setting,” he added.
He said the hospital started to schedule appointments for primary care at the Monmouth Family Health Center on Broadway for patients who would otherwise visit the emergency room.
According to Vozos, about 75 percent of the appointments set up with the health center were kept.
Vozos noted that Monmouth Medical is unique because it is a teaching hospital with eight residency programs and about 105 residents.
“We are very proud of this distinction. We are one of the few independent academic medical institutions around nowadays,” he said.
The hospital is affiliated with Drexel University in Philadelphia and has a relationship with St. George’s University in Grenada.
He spoke highly of the medical center’s volunteer community, which fills positions ranging from clerical work to patient comfort.
There are currently 130 active volunteers at Monmouth Medical who serve about 644 hours per week.
Monmouth Medical, a member of the St. Barnabas Health system, serves approximately 182,000 outpatients, 2,300 inpatients, 50,000 emergency room visitors, and delivers over 4,300 newborns per year.