Crozer’s ‘buyer of last resort’ | Philly Health Insider
Also, an OCD expert on diagnosing your own child.
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In this edition, we detail how a New Jersey real estate company described as a “buyer of last resort” for financially distressed hospitals became the prospective owner of Crozer Health.
We also break down child-cancer hospital admissions in Pennsylvania, highlight the latest “nuclear verdict” in a medical malpractice case, and dig into Penn’s lawsuit seeking more money in royalties from the COVID-19 vaccine.
And also, why it took a while for an OCD expert to diagnose their own child. Let’s get into it.
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— Abraham Gutman, Aubrey Whelan, and Alison McCook, Inquirer health reporters, @abgutman, @aubreywhelan, @alisonmccook.
The future of Delaware County’s largest health system could soon be in the hands of CHA Partners LLC, a New Jersey-based company that specializes in buying hospital properties and redeveloping them into mixed-use medical facilities.
After years of cutting services and closing hospitals, owner Prospect Medical Holdings Inc. signed a tentative agreement last week to sell Crozer for undisclosed terms. The Los Angeles-based for-profit has owned Crozer for eight years.
The agreement comes after months of uncertainty as to whether Crozer could even find a buyer.
The Pa. Attorney General’s Office intervened earlier this year to ensure Crozer would be sold to a nonprofit, citing its vital services to residents of Chester and surrounding communities.
CHA was described as a “buyer of last resort” in court filings over Prospect’s sale of a New Jersey hospital.
It will convert Crozer to a nonprofit and plans a different playbook in Delco than the company’s usual MO of redeveloping closed hospitals.
That means running Crozer’s hospitals. Our colleague Harold Brubaker’s reporting looked at CHA’s previous attempt at doing so with the former Memorial Hospital of Salem County in South Jersey. In the end, a local foundation set up in 2002 to maintain community health programs after the hospital was sold to a for-profit spent half its endowment on loans and grants to the hospital. Inspira Health Network eventually took over and renamed the hospital Inspira Medical Center Mannington.
How CHA manages Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland and Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park, and whether they reopen Springfield Hospital in Springfield Township and Delaware County Memorial Hospital in Drexel Hill remains to be seen. And the deal is not yet done. ChristianaCare signed a preliminary agreement in 2022 for Crozer, only to eventually back out.
Read more about Prospect’s moves since buying Crozer in 2016, and the next steps for the sale.
Temple University Hospital is on the hook for $45 million in the latest “nuclear verdict,” as some describe medical malpractice jury awards exceeding $10 million. A Philadelphia jury ordered the hospital to pay a teenager who choked on food at home, which led to severe brain damage, after Temple discharged him after treatment for a gunshot wound to the neck.
The University of Pennsylvania is suing Pfizer’s partner in the COVID-19 vaccine over royalties. The university already made north of $1.6 billion from the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that utilizes the patented mRNA technology discovered by Penn scientists — and was celebrated last fall with a Nobel Prize.
Philadelphia and Merakey, a large provider of behavioral health and intellectual disability services, are opening a walk-in clinic for people needing mental health care on North Broad Street. The first-of-its-kind clinic is billed as the mental health equivalent of an urgent care, for people who need support but aren’t in crisis.
This week’s number: 2,392.
That’s the number of child-cancer hospital admissions in the Philadelphia area between 2021 and 2023. That counts for roughly a third of all admissions in the state.
Young children were more likely than teenagers to be hospitalized for cancer. A third of the admissions were for children under 4 years old, while less than 20% of admissions were patients 15 to 17 years old.
Read more on how child-cancer hospital admission rates varied in the state.
Each week, we highlight state inspections at the various hospitals in our region. Up this week: North Philly’s Shriners Children’s Philadelphia. Inspectors found no problems during a site visit at the orthopedic specialty-hospital between December 2023 and May.
Emily Becker-Haimes, an assistant professor in the psychiatry department within Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, treats children with obsessive-compulsive disorder. But she knows it can be hard to differentiate between the kinds of routines that kids normally develop and OCD.
She learned that lesson at home.
“I’m an OCD specialist. I’ve been working with kids with OCD for almost 13 years,” Becker-Haimes said. “It still took me some time to recognize what was going on for my own kid.”
Read more about how to recognize OCD in children and her tips for parents.
Making moves
John Lasky, who has served as the chief human resources officer at Temple Health for over a decade, will join Memorial Sloan Kettering in September as chief people officer. Lasky announced his move to the NYC cancer hospital in a LinkedIn post saying, “Temple Health team will be colleagues for life. I know the same will be true with the MSK team.”
Want his old job? Reach out to Pamela Noble at pamela.noble@tcgco.com. She leads the agency conducting the search on Temple’s behalf.
Being diagnosed with cancer is … scary. Overwhelming. Complicating. A program at Jefferson aims to help, and new data suggests the support they offer can improve patient outcomes and lower costs.
Within 48 hours of a diagnosis, cancer patients — including those not treated at Jefferson — can make a telehealth appointment to speak with an oncology nurse-practitioner or physician’s assistant. Based on their needs, they may be referred to Jefferson’s supportive oncology care, which addresses everything from help for symptoms such as fatigue and nausea, to linking patients to financial assistance, and tackling problems related to transportation, housing, child care, and employment.
In a paper published online in April by the journal Cancer, researchers at Jefferson Health and Independence Blue Cross found that, after 30 to 90 days, patients who received Jefferson’s supportive oncology care had up to 70% fewer admissions to the hospital, and up to 54% fewer ER visits than other patients. After 90 days, the supportive care group had up to 25% lower costs. “It feels like this extra level of support is a win all around,” said study author Brooke Worster, associate professor of medicine and enterprise director of supportive oncology at Jefferson Health.
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