Last Friday’s announcement that Skiff Medical Center would be adding state-of-the-art medical imaging equipment was fantastic news — good for patients, good for the hospital itself and good for the community as a whole.
It’s what you’d call win-win-win news and a reminder that good things are happening in Newton all the time.
Skiff has made significant progress in a turnaround from several years ago when the hospital was coping with financial woes. Things have improved over the last year with shrinking losses, but CEO Steve Long has said the bottom line still isn’t quite where the hospital wants it to be.
The new imaging center could be the move that puts Skiff into the black. Radiology is a money-maker for the hospital and the new equipment should provide a surge in revenue for Skiff. Long and the rest of the hospital personnel are to be commended for their efforts in striking a deal with Philips, a medical imaging technology company, to create the Philips Imaging Center. Skiff will contribute a mere $3 million to create an estimated $7 million elite imaging center.
Skiff is slated to receive roughly $3.5 million in federal funds via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Rather than sandbagging the government aid to cover operational losses in the short term, hospital officials made the decision to grow for the future, investing money in a partnership with Philips to create the imaging center.
That’s an excellent plan.
Likely, the hospital was going to have to update its equipment anyway, at an estimated $2.15 million for “basic” upgrades. By partnering with Philips, Skiff leverages the additional $850,000 for a $7 million center — good business.
Let’s run down the list of what Skiff will receive: New top-of-the-line X-ray equipment with digital capture and a reduced radiation dose? Check. CT equipment upgrades from “4-slice” to “128-slice” technology, shorter scans and even the ability to conduct a less invasive “virtual colonoscopy”? Check. How about a Digital Broadband MRI with shorter test times, less signal noise and the ability to show patients relaxing images while they are being tested? Check.
Anyone who’s ever had an MRI will tell you that it’s no picnic lying there in an enclosed tube. Viewing nature scenes or watching cartoons should make the whole thing much, much easier to endure for a typical patient.
Having better equipment makes it that much easier for local patients to choose Skiff. Perhaps even better, the new equipment should draw people from outside the community to our hospital for superior imaging services. That means more outside revenue coming into Skiff and our community.
Long told the Daily News last December that it was important for Skiff to increase its patient count.
“We live and die on volume, which means we need people to use us,” he said. “Our message to the community is, ‘We want to be their hospital of choice.’”
This move will go a long way for making Skiff not only Newton’s hospital of choice, but a destination for care throughout the region and that, in turn, will increase revenue and, hopefully get our hospital where it needs to be.