Charlton Outpost Up And Running For Harrington | Expansion helps independent hospital stay competitive
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DOCTOR'S IN: Harrington Hospital has established new operations off of Route 20 in Charlton. The facility includes an MRI center, pictured above.
In the latest in a series of expansion efforts, Harrington Hospital of Southbridge has opened a satellite location in Charlton with four primary care doctors and services including a blood-drawing station and an MRI operation.
“We’re really excited about it,” said CEO Edward H. Moore. “I think it’s going to make a difference in the community.”
Baby Steps
Moore said Harrington has been rolling out the new 20,000-square-foot facility piece by piece. The MRI facility, staffed by radiologists from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, opened last June. The four primary care physicians, along with a nurse practitioner and support staff, moved into the second floor on March 1. Moore said hospital satellite facilities on the first floor should open around the end of April. They’ll include digital mammography and ultrasound machines, orthopedics, physical and occupational therapy and two hyperbaric oxygen chambers for wound healing.
Depending on demand, Moore said, Harrington may add a CT scanner within the next year.
All four doctors at the new facility previously worked for the Fallon Clinic location in Charlton, which closed after they left. Moore said the doctors were happy to move to a system that was more likely to keep patients local rather than sending them to Worcester for further treatment. He said most of the doctors’ patients moved with them to the new facility.
Linda Coccola, a spokeswoman for Fallon, said the clinic closed the Charlton location because the loss of the four doctors left it without enough medical personnel to sustain operations. With primary care doctors in short supply everywhere, she said, Fallon couldn’t replace the physicians quickly enough to maintain operations.
Coccola said Fallon didn’t track where all the site’s patients went but she said many of them moved to a different Fallon location to keep seeing the same specialists and taking advantage of Fallon programs like its electronic health records.
Aggressive Moves
Harrington has expanded in several directions lately. Last spring it took over the former Hubbard Regional Hospital in Webster, transforming it into an outpatient clinic. In June, it opened a freestanding radiation therapy unit at the Southbridge campus in a partnership with 21st Century Oncology Inc. It’s also recently revamped its main hospital building with new patient rooms, a women’s health center and a new phlebotomy area.
Moore said Harrington started a concerted effort to expand when he took over as CEO two and a half years ago.
“The board at that time began to see some volumes starting to decline, slow but steady,” he said. “It became apparent to them that we needed to implement things that made us somewhat more regional in nature.”
The takeover of Hubbard was a happy coincidence, Moore said, but the hospital’s other expansion efforts were a direct outgrowth of plans hospital officials made in 2008.
Harrington’s net patient services revenue for fiscal 2008 was $70 million. For 2009, Moore said, it was nearly $100 million, and is still growing. He said the growth comes from the Webster and Charlton facilities, and from the addition of new doctors and new specialty programs in Sturbridge.
Now, Moore said, the challenge is aligning costs with the increased income. He said the hospital had an operating loss of between $1.5 and $2 million for the last fiscal year. While much of the expansion has been joint ventures that didn’t require an up-front payment from the hospital, he said Harrington has had some build-out costs to contend with.
“We were very mindful of the expense,” Moore said, “But one thing I can tell you is the return on the investment will be significant.”
And, he added, Harrington didn’t have many choices if it wanted to stay viable.
“No one’s paying you a lot more to provide the same services,” he said.
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