Westfield (N.Y.) Memorial Hospital plans to end inpatient care and focus on providing outpatient and emergency care if CMS and the New York State Department of Health approve its application to transition to a rural emergency hospital.
Under the REH designation, Westfield Memorial, part of Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Health Network, would close its four inpatient beds but continue providing emergency services, observation care and — if elected by the hospital — additional outpatient services that do not exceed an annual per-patient average of 24 hours.
In exchange, the hospital would receive a 5% increase in Medicare payments and an average facility fee payment of about $3.2 million a year.
Allegheny Health believes converting the hospital to a REH would ensure the facility's long-term financial and operational stability and maintain care access for its patients in Westfield and the surrounding Chautauqua County region. Westfield Memorial is the only hospital Allegheny Health operates outside Pennsylvania.
"The rural emergency hospital designation was built for a hospital like Westfield," Rodney Buchanan, DNP, administrator of Westfield Memorial, said in a Jan. 7 news release. "We are a vital health care access point for our community, but the vast majority of the services we provide are outpatient in nature."
Westfield Memorial has thousands of outpatient and observational visits each year, along with nearly 10,000 emergency department visits. However, it only admits 110-150 inpatients a year — about 10-12 per month — with just four licensed inpatient beds.
"Maintaining a 24/7 inpatient unit is costly, and the expenses aren't warranted by the volume we see at Westfield," Dr. Buchanan said. "By converting to a rural emergency hospital, we can redirect those resources toward new programs that are a better fit for our community and retain and grow the specialties and services that are most important to our patients."
Pending approval from the state department of health, the REH conversion would likely take effect in 2026. Most patients requiring overnight inpatient stay would be transferred to Allegheny Health's Saint Vincent Hospital in Erie, Pa., about 35 miles away.
So far, only 35 hospitals, mostly in the South and Midwest, have completed the REH conversion. This CMS program aims to address rural hospital closures and ease financial pressures, many of which continue to operate in the red.