Roughly 30 people in need of renal dialysis in northern Berkshire County will now have access to a facility nearby.Berkshire Health Systems is opening a nine-chair renal dialysis center in North Adams on Thursday. Dr. David Henner, the medical director of the organization’s renal dialysis centers, gave reporters a tour of the space Wednesday.
“Patients are going to come here typically three times a week, occasionally a patient needs it four times a week to get dialysis which is basically cleaning their blood with the machines to do the work that the kidneys normally do,” Henner said. “So normally the kidneys do this vital function 24 hours a day, seven days a week which is 168 hours. So we’re doing that here in about 12 hours on average a week.”
The $2.2 million center is located at the North Adams Campus of Berkshire Medical Center inside what was the Doctor’s Building of the former North Adams Regional Hospital. BHS bought the campus after the hospital closed in March 2014. Its parent company Northern Berkshire Healthcare filed for bankruptcy shortly after. BHS CEO David Phelps says not too many healthcare systems would make this investment for roughly 30 patients.
“Services that require high frequency engagements with patients – we want them to be as close to the people as they can be,” Phelps said. “So you’ll see a lot of outpatient and support services. We have some other things that’ll be coming this year that’ll be like this – services that people need frequently, post-hospitalization to remain healthy that will be closer and more available to them. That’s what we’re focusing on now.”
BHS says this is the first renal dialysis center in northern Berkshire County. The organization runs two other centers in Pittsfield and Great Barrington. Ed Lewis of Williamstown has been on dialysis for four years, a treatment doctors say can leave people feeling sick to their stomach and with low blood pressure. Lewis says his roughly 35 minute one-way trip to Pittsfield has been cut to nine minutes.
“Now I have a home life,” Lewis said. “Because my wife’s a nurse and she works elsewhere. She’s usually getting home as I’m getting ready to leave. We have children and grandchildren. So we’ll be able to do a lot more things.”
The North Adams dialysis center will be open Monday through Saturday. BHS also plans to open a new dialysis center on Dan Fox Drive in Pittsfield later this year. The current Pittsfield center is located at the medical center campus. With some patients now going to the North Adams unit, the Pittsfield center will serve about 80 people.
Since North Adams Regional Hospital closed, some in the region, such as the North County Cares Coalition, have continued to call for restoring inpatient beds. The North Adams campus has 24-hour emergency service and a couple of holding beds. Phelps says reestablishing inpatient service is not something BHS is thinking about right now. He says there have been a number of healthcare changes since the closure that would make it even more challenging to operate a full-service hospital.
“In the past 45 days at BMC we’ve had, between federal and state reimbursements for Medicare and Medicaid, we have lost about $15 million in revenue from 2016 projected for next year,” Phelps said. “Just by unilateral changes in how we’re paid. So we’re going through this big change in reimbursement. In our community, people may not appreciate it, but about 75 percent of our revenues are from Medicare and Medicaid.”
Phelps added that there is not much negotiating when it comes to government payment.
“They send you the contract and you sign it,” Phelps said. “They determine your rates. They determine how you’re going to be paid, when you’re going to be paid and what they’re going to cover. So it’s a very uncertain time for providers, not just Berkshire, but for all the providers throughout the state.”
