As President & CEO of a rural Vermont well being system, I’ve witnessed lots of our choices evolve, from expanded entry to medical know-how to our specialty care. However one factor has remained the identical – our dedication to offer entry to high-quality, complete, and reasonably priced well being take care of rural communities and sufferers.
Sadly, nevertheless, this care is turning into increasingly more difficult to offer as well being care labor, provide chains, and working prices proceed to rise whereas Medicare and Medicaid funds proceed to lack the mandatory protection for the prices hospitals incur to offer care.
That’s why our group and numerous different hospitals across the nation depend on a important program – the 340B Drug Pricing Program – to assist our mission. The 340B program permits hospitals and well being techniques like ours to entry prescription prescription drugs at a diminished worth. This, in flip, permits our group and different 340B hospitals nationwide to supply extra complete providers to our communities and sufferers—lots of whom are low-income, seniors, and medically weak people. This contains monetary help applications in addition to a spread of revolutionary, community-based well being care choices and providers.
Like most 340B hospitals, the overwhelming majority of the sufferers we serve are older or people with disabilities lined by authorities applications. Actually, greater than 70% of the care we offer is for sufferers enrolled in both Medicare or Medicaid. These authorities applications chronically underpay for care, which alone places important monetary strain on hospitals like ours that serve a disproportionately bigger share of those sufferers.
As our nation’s getting older inhabitants continues to develop, the demand for well being care focusing on the distinctive wants of senior sufferers will solely improve—placing a good better pressure on 340B hospitals like ours. Sustaining, defending, and strengthening the 340B program is critically essential to assist offset the losses hospitals face because of underpayments.
Furthermore, financial savings from the 340B program assist assist and fund important workforce growth applications in addition to specialty and first care providers that permit us to recruit and retain the skilled assist wanted to satisfy the numerous advanced care wants of the sufferers and communities we serve.
That features a transitional care nursing program that gives sufferers with at-home assist providers after being discharged from the hospital. By assembly sufferers the place they’re and proactively addressing well being wants, this system has considerably diminished hospital readmission charges and the typical hospital length-of-stay, permitting sufferers to get well and rehabilitate safely in their very own houses whereas sustaining their high quality of life.
Moreover, our group has expanded entry to important oncology providers by utilizing 340B financial savings to assist maintain our regional most cancers middle, which is accredited by the American School of Surgeons Fee on Most cancers. This regional facility helps convey most cancers care nearer to sufferers’ houses, bettering entry and lowering prices whereas eliminating the necessity for our rural sufferers to journey lengthy distances to entry oncology care.
As with many rural communities, the sufferers we serve usually wrestle to entry major care. The 340B program has been important in permitting us to develop major care entry by opening a number of clinics in communities with notably excessive charges of persistent illnesses—once more, serving to meet sufferers’ wants of their native communities moderately than forcing sufferers to journey to the emergency room.
The 340B program has additionally helped our group enhance our well being care staffing pipeline and handle the workforce shortages in our neighborhood and all through the nation. Leveraging 340B financial savings, we now have been in a position to pilot a number of revolutionary applications—partnering with native faculties, permitting nursing college students to finish medical rotation, and supporting present workers involved in transitioning to a profession in nursing by paying them whereas they full their tutorial research—all geared toward growing a stronger, extra strong well being care workforce.
In brief, our group couldn’t maintain itself or the applications we offer to enhance the well being and well-being of our neighborhood with out financial savings from the 340B program. We’re extremely happy with the work we now have performed to satisfy the distinctive well being care wants of our neighborhood for over 100 years. To make sure that rural hospitals like ours can proceed delivering high-quality, complete well being care, the federal authorities should assist and shield the 340B Drug Pricing Program that allows us to do what we do finest.
Photograph: ipopba, Getty Pictures
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