What the closure of Taylor Hospital’s operating rooms means for a veteran orthopedic surgeon

Orthopedic surgeon Jeffrey Malumed, president of Premier Orthopaedics, has been doing operations at Crozer Health’s Taylor Hospital for 35 years.

Crozer’s decision to end surgeries at Taylor means that run will end by Sept. 1, marking the latest cut at the for-profit health system that for years has been shuttering services and closing locations in Delaware County.

In a note to staff Tuesday, Crozer CEO Tony Esposito said Taylor had been averaging three to four surgeries a day in the last few months. The dwindling number of procedures forced the money-losing health system to consolidate services at other locations.

“It’s disheartening,” Malumed said this week. “I’ve been with Taylor since it was a bustling institution. We had five ORs, 30 cases a day, four floors of patients. Times have changed.”

» READ MORE: Crozer Health will be sold to CHA Partners, converted back into nonprofit

Premier, which says it has more than 35 locations in Southeastern Pennsylvania, likely accounted for most of the procedures at Taylor, in Ridley Park. Premier was still doing 700 to 800 surgeries, such as joint replacements, annually at Taylor, according to Malumed, who helped found Premier in 2000.

Premier, part of private-equity-backed Healthcare Outcomes Performance Co., has three ambulatory surgery centers where it will move some of the surgeries that would have been done at Taylor.

Those locations — in King of Prussia, Exton, and West Chester — are not convenient for people who come to Taylor, Malumed acknowledged. Some Premier cases will move to Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland.

Crozer’s shuttered Springfield Hospital was close to becoming Premier’s fourth surgery center. State regulators balked at a plan to put the service in the hospital, which would have required a different license. A proposal to put it in an office building on the site was nixed by the building’s landlord.

Last week, Crozer’s parent, Prospect Medical Holdings Inc. of Los Angeles, announced that it had signed a letter of intent to sell Crozer to CHA Partners, a New Jersey company that has acquired four closed hospitals and redeveloped them as mix-use medical buildings.

The tentative agreement calls for CHA to create a nonprofit that would own Crozer, but a final deal is months away and would require numerous government agencies and private entities to reach agreement on Crozer’s liabilities, such as its underfunded pension and its mortgage, and other matters.

» READ MORE: CHA Partners: A look at the company that wants to buy Crozer Health in Delaware County

Meanwhile, Crozer’s losses increased this year amid the uncertainty over the system’s future, Esposito said in an interview last week.

“Right now, we’re just holding tight and trying to hold everything together until we get to this transaction,” he said.