Targeting troubled providers | Philly Health Insider

Good morning. This week, we have a deep dive into a nonprofit that targets financially struggling health providers for acquisitions. Plus, there’s news on how Philly could get dinged for questionable spending of money from the opioid lawsuit settlements and a look at how many more out-of-state patients are now coming to Pennsylvania for abortions.

If someone forwarded you this newsletter, sign up here.

📮 Got tips, questions, or suggestions? For a chance to be featured in this newsletter, email us back.

— Aubrey Whelan and Abraham Gutman, Inquirer health reporters, @abrahamgutman and @aubreywhelan.

Our big story this week looks at the inner workings of Inperium, a fast-growing Reading nonprofit that has been snapping up struggling health and human service providers. Its latest target is Resources for Human Development, a Philly-based organization that found itself $10 million in the red this fiscal year.

All that financial turmoil made RHD very attractive to Inperium, whose CEO, Ryan Smith, uses a computer program to dig through nonprofits’ 990s, singling out the weakest and marking them for acquisition.

Our colleague Harold Brubaker unspools the tale of how RHD’s management lost control of the 54-year-old agency respected for serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and providing behavioral health services. And how, with the deal still pending, RHD’s board has rapidly turned over and is now being steered by a former Inperium executive whose annual pay there topped $850,000.

In the last eight years, Inperium has made 37 acquisitions in a dozen states and increased its revenue by a whopping $358 million. (It has also increased its boss’s pay: Smith makes $1.3 million a year, more than the CEOs at larger Philly nonprofits in the same field.)

Inperium bills its acquisitions as a path for struggling health services providers to become financially sustainable by helping them with back-office infrastructure but allowing them to remain more or less independent. But some providers bought by Inperium say that’s not exactly the case. One North Carolina organization ended up with $400,000 in debt and had to pay for Inperium’s lawyers monthly after the buyout.

“They sell you on, we’ll help you, we’ll upgrade you, we will get you into our systems,” the organization’s former director told Harold, “but in the end you’re still paying for them — and you’re paying them with interest.”

Today’s big number: 3,311.

That’s how many out-of-state residents received an abortion in Pennsylvania in 2022, the year Roe v. Wade was struck down. It’s a 41% increase from the year before.

The vast majority of the abortions in Pennsylvania are among Pennsylvanians. But as other states enact increasingly restrictive abortion laws, Pennsylvania has become a “critical access point” for patients from the middle of the country, our colleague Sarah Gantz reports.

Patients from Ohio drove the surge in out-of-state abortion seekers: 1,378 Ohioans obtained abortions in Pennsylvania in 2022, up from just 557 the year before, after their state enacted a six-week abortion ban.

Patients from Delaware were the second-highest out-of-state group, with 891 getting an abortion here in 2022, followed by West Virginia and New Jersey.

Each week, we highlight the results of various hospital inspections in the region. Up this week: Lower Bucks Hospital. Two on-site inspections at the Bristol hospital between October 2023 and March 2024 identified no problems.

Tanisha Belton, a health researcher who serves as the senior manager of research initiatives at CHOP’s PolicyLab, first learned about sickle cell disease when she was 12 years old. That’s when her newborn twin sisters were diagnosed with the painful blood disorder.

Since 2018, Belton has worked on a project that aims to help young adults with sickle cell to manage the disease on their own. She’s testing the efficacy of a mobile app and a program that pairs patients with community health workers who have sickle cell themselves.

So far, the community health workers are a hit, she told our colleague Wendy Ruderman: “I think having someone who could identify with them helped folks feel a little more comfortable.”

Michael Sneed, a retired Johnson & Johnson executive, is the incoming chair of Thomas Jefferson University’s board of trustees, which oversees the operations and budget of the university, Jefferson Health, and the Jefferson Health Plans insurance business.

He’ll step into the role next year, replacing Patricia Wellenbach, the president and CEO of West Philly’s Please Touch Museum. Wellenbach had been the first woman to serve as chair.

Sneed was most recently the executive vice president for global corporate affairs and chief communication officer at J&J. He also serves on several other boards: at the Princeton-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Wayfair, and Philly’s own WHYY.

During a heat wave as miserable as last week’s, most attention gets paid to the ungodly temperatures outside, while those blessed enough to have air-conditioning hunker indoors and compulsively crank down the thermostat.

But what if you don’t have air-conditioning — or enough money to keep it on? Without A/C, staying inside during a heat wave can be dangerous, too. It’s especially risky in a place like Philadelphia, with its limited tree cover and old housing stock making indoor temperatures even hotter.

A recent Drexel study highlighted the existing research on the dangers of this under-researched phenomenon, which can lead to heart and respiratory issues, a higher risk of blood clots, and impaired kidney function.

📮 Did you treat any heat-related ailments this week? For a chance to be featured in this newsletter, email us back.

By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.