Delta Health CEO Jon Cohee hosted a Town Meeting in Hotchkiss last week, and about 40 people came to ask about a variety of issues faced by Delta County’s hospital and clinics.
The audience included health professionals and patients. Moriah Melin W., a midwife in the North Fork, asked about the effects of the recent OB -GYN decision to move births from the Delta Hospital to the Montrose Hospital.
“Obviously, folks who've done the family practice training, it’s a big part of their revenue and their intention for practice is to do OB care, right?” she said. “And so if the OB unit is closed, and it sounds like from what I hear most folks, although the option to do their prenatal care still remains for first and second trimester, people are choosing to do their prenatal care elsewhere from the beginning. And so if all of that revenue kind of dries up for the family practice docs, my concern is that they would then want to leave the county as well. So I'm just curious, how do we help keep them? Because they're such an integral part of our community, and they serve this womb to tomb, and I love them."
“My concern as well,” responded Cohee. “How do I keep my family practice OB doctors? Just had a meeting with them, and not to divulge a whole lot, but I offered them the same contract. I keep them whole. I keep them whole and next year we reevaluate where this is, because I don't want them to suffer. They might not have as many babies that they can deliver. And I know one of the providers is trying to work right now with St. Mary's and with Montrose to be able to do that. But contractually, like from a dollar and cent standpoint, I keep them whole to keep them here. And the conversation I had with them is we don't know, I think 18 to 24 months we can open this up.”
Cohee was also asked about the lack of mental health services in Delta County.
“What we do and what we've done the last couple of years is we've added what we call peers to the emergency department.,” he said. “And these peers will help behavioral health patients that come into the ED, because prior to, those patients would end up on the floor. And then our nurses and their physicians don't know how to handle them, but we built this peer group, so they work with patients that come in that have behavioral health issues, and we have built, through the system locally, and through the state, resources. So if they come in, we do the evaluation, we're able to rather quickly now get them to that next level of care. That's best case scenario. However, here in the Western Slope, right now the only place you can go is Utah or Denver."
Cohee said Delta Health was one of eight hospitals in the United States chosen for the Rural Hospital Stabilization Program, which has about $3 million to disperse.
He said that starting in December, Delta Health plans to have an urgent care facility in Delta open six days a week, 12 hours a day. In the next year, he hopes to expand hours for the urgent care service housed in the West Elk Clinic in Hotchkiss.
Because of the passage of the big, beautiful bill, Cohee said it's likely that up to 1,400 people will be eliminated from Delta County's Medicaid rolls by 2027, representing a loss of $2 to $3 million a year for the hospital.
Former hospital board chair Jean Ceriani urged Cohee to conduct town meetings at least once a quarter.
“I just think that we as a group are happier if we know what's going on,” she said.
