Hahnemann picking up ER visits from closed St. Joe's

Since North Philadelphia's St. Joseph's Hospital closed March 11, Hahnemann University Hospital has picked up most of the emergency-room volume that used to go to St. Joseph's, at 15th Street and Girard Avenue, a state official said.

"The emergency runs primarily go to Hahnemann now. Sometimes, depending on where they are from, they may go to Temple or some other place," Ted Dallas, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, said this week.

St. Joseph's was the biggest component of the perennially money-losing North Philadelphia Health System, which received a state subsidy that ballooned to $16 million in the year ended June 30, from an average of less than $10 million in the five years ended in fiscal 2012.

When the state decided to stop the subsidy, St. Joseph's could no longer operate. North Philadelphia Health System still operates Girard Medical Center, at Eighth Street and Girard Avenue, where drug and alcohol services and psychiatric services have been expanded.

Employment at Girard Medical Center has increased to about 450 from 400 as a result of the expansion there, said Kevin Feeley, spokesman for North Philadelphia Health System. He said that about 400 of the 675 who used to work at St. Joseph's have new jobs.

The closing of St. Joseph's is part of a broad effort to reorganize the way health care is delivered in an impoverished section of the city "and see if we can build it into something that's a model for delivering health care in an area like North Philadelphia," Dallas said.

Shrinking along with the operations of the North Philadelphia Health System will be the pay of its chief executive, George J. Walmsley 3d, Feeley said.

Walmsley was paid - relative to the size of the health system - a hefty $583,931 in 2013.

Board chairman Dominic Sabatini, who received $217,093 in a rare case of a tax-exempt organization paying its chairman, also faces a pay cut.

The health system's board hired a consultant to make recommendations on what Walmsley and Sabatini should be paid. "We expect answers pretty quickly, in the next few weeks," Feeley said.

For Hahnemann, the closure has been followed by an uptick in emergency-room visits, though a spokesman said it was too soon to say how much of that would have gone to St. Joseph's.

Hahnemann hired 28 people from St. Joseph's and is in the midst of spending $2 million to renovate its emergency room, giving it the capacity to handle an additional 16,000 patients a year - an increase of as much as 40 percent.

St. Joseph's tallied about 21,000 emergency department visits annually.

hbrubaker@phillynews.com

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