St. Mary's to convert to outpatient facility
St. Peter's Health Partners of Albany, N.Y., plans to invest $150 million in its two Troy, N.Y., hospitals over the next 12 years. The project will add an inpatient pavilion at Samaritan Hospital and convert St. Mary's Hospital from an inpatient to an ambulatory care campus.
The project will decrease the total number of beds at St. Peter's Troy facilities to 237 from 342 but will increase the percentage of private rooms.
Plans have called for this inpatient consolidation and bed count reduction since the 2011 merger that brought together St. Peter's Health Care Services of Albany, which had one Albany hospital called St. Peter's Hospital; Seton Health of Troy and its St. Mary's Hospital; and Northeast Health of Troy, which included Samaritan Hospital in Troy and Albany Memorial Hospital. The merged system, called St. Peter's Health Partners, currently includes the two hospitals in Troy and the two hospitals in Albany, which is about 8 miles from Troy.
A study completed premerger said that with more care being provided on an outpatient basis, it was appropriate to decrease the inpatient bed count. The study said the hospitals could be reconfigured to improve health care access, efficiency and financial stability. St. Peter's newly released strategic plan for the project affirms those findings.
A first phase of the project will add the five-story pavilion, an expanded emergency department and an intensive care unit to the non-Catholic Samaritan. Also, Samaritan's nursing school and some Samaritan outpatient services will relocate to the Catholic St. Mary's.
During the next phase, Samaritan will complete a medical-surgical unit in the pavilion, and Samaritan's inpatient geriatric psychiatry unit may move to another St. Peter's campus, Albany Memorial Hospital.
The last phase will transition St. Mary's into an outpatient facility by 2025 by renovating that campus to provide urgent care, imaging, chemotherapy, ambulatory surgery and other services.
Some aspects of the campuses' construction project still require government approval and the securing of capital.
Copyright © 2013 by the Catholic Health Association of the United States
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