Supreme Court ruling assures future of Mon Valley project

Kris B. Mamula

Reporter- Pittsburgh Business Times

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Among the beneficiaries of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act will be elderly people with breathing and heart problems who live in the Mon Valley.

The ruling assures the future of a project by the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative to open a medical center, staffed by nurses, who will oversee the care of people with chronic health problems at Monongahela Valley Hospital. The Department of Health and Human Services chose PRHI from among only 26 organizations nationwide for funding of the project, which is intended to reduce the number of unnecessary hospital readmissions.

“There was a lot riding on this,” PRHI President and CEO Karen Wolk Feinstein said. “There are a lot of good solutions in this act.

“This is the biggest relief in the world.”

The center began seeing patients the second week of June.

The three-year HHS grant to PRHI totaled $10.4 million and Mon Valley is the first of three such clinics planned. It will serve around 130 doctors who admit patients to the hospital, including about 50 primary care doctors.

An estimated 700 people in the Mon Valley have chronic breathing or heart problems and another 1,500 have heart vessels that are clogged. Hospital readmission rates within a month of discharge in the region are 22 percent for chronic breathing problems, 27 percent for congestive heart failure, which exceed national averages.

Health care reform created new payment and care delivery approaches and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which rewards providers for quality of care over volume and increases reimbursement to primary care doctors.

Kris Mamula covers health care, insurance and employee benefits for the Pittsburgh Business Times. Contact him at kmamula@bizjournals.com or (412) 208-3825.