Good Samaritan Takes a New Path for Homeless Patients

0

Amid the outcry over alleged dumping of discharged hospital patients on Skid Row, one downtown Los Angeles hospital has reached out to a homeless services provider outside the downtown core.


Good Samaritan Hospital, which is not among hospitals accused of patient dumping, last week donated $24,000 to People Assisting the Homeless to formalize a relationship developing over the past several weeks.


“We’re all responsible within the community for taking care of these patients, but we need help,” said hospital Chief Executive Andy Leeka. “PATH is a wonderful place, great in what it does. And we believe they’ll be a great partner in helping these patients when they’re ready to be discharged from the hospital.”


Patient discharge workers at Good Samaritan will be able to call on PATH to assist discharged homeless patients who do not have an alternative location in which to recuperate. In return, the hospital will help PATH’s own health clinic obtain free or reduced price medications, and if needed, treat PATH clients at the hospital.


“It’s not the responsibility of hospitals to become homeless service agencies,” said PATH Chief Executive Joel Roberts. “They need to be able to discharge patients to a caring professional provider who can take care of them. Any services we may get in return from the hospital is just icing on the cake for us.”


PATH, which provided transitional housing and social services for more than 10,000 homeless last year, is known for its innovative “mall” service delivery model, providing space to 20 public and private agencies at its regional center on the east edge of Silver Lake. The program also offers 200 shelter beds at the main facility and satellites in Hollywood and West L.A.


The program is considered a model for homeless service providers, with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa going there last month to announce his proposal to spend $4.6 million to fund 372 new emergency shelter beds.


The hospital-PATH partnership is one outcome of a hospital staff task force that for months has been studying ways for Good Samaritan to better deal with homeless and other uninsured patients who began flooding private hospital emergency rooms two years ago because of county financial problems. Those problems prompted the county to close several county clinics and restrict private hospitals from transferring indigent patients to county hospitals.


Uncompensated care, much of it for homeless patients, costs Good Samaritan’s emergency room $10 million a year, said Leeka. The additional patients forced the hospital to convert office space into triage facilities to handle the larger case load.



REIT Realignment

Health Care Property Investors Inc. last week announced several moves that reordered its portfolio, unloading more than half of its nursing home properties and buying out the interest of a joint venture partner that was ready to take its profits.


The Long Beach-based real estate investment trust said it sold to unnamed parties 78 skilled nursing facilities run by 28 different operators around the country for $443.5 million, leaving it with 66 such facilities.


The deals shift the REIT’s property mix from 16 percent skilled-nursing to only 4 percent. Because nursing homes are reliant on public payers, they are considered a riskier investment than properties with a larger private payer revenue base, such as senior housing, of which the REIT owns 333 facilities. The company also owns 265 medical office buildings and 30 hospitals.


“Management has been saying for a while that they’re not comfortable with the risk-reward relationship with nursing home investments,” said Robert Main, an analyst with Ryan Beck & Co. “While nursing homes are performing well now, there’s some concern about how well they’ll do in the future.”


The company significantly added to its private payer properties in October when it acquired CNL Retirement Properties Inc., which increased its senior housing portfolio from 34 percent to 58 percent of assets. Analyst Paul Morgan at Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. Inc. estimates that private-pay sources now account for 87 percent of the REIT’s revenues, up from 51 percent four years ago.


In the second deal announced last week, HCP said it paid $141 million to buy out the interest of an affiliate of General Electric Co. in a joint venture formed in 2003 to own 59 medical office buildings.


The REIT, which had a 30 percent share in the venture, likely will seek another partner, Mains said, and has been exploring potential partnerships for some of the CNL properties it acquired. The company’s shares were trading at $36.35 last week and are up 43 percent so far this year.



Staff reporter Deborah Crowe can be reached at (323) 549-5255, ext. 232, or at

[email protected]

.

No posts to display