If you've visited the Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center recently, you may have noticed some subtle changes, like new signage.
About a year ago, Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center in Ogdensburg announced plans to split into two facilities, Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center and Claxton-Hepburn Medical Campus.
Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center now refers to a stand-alone mental health hospital, encompassing adult and children inpatient units, and outpatient mental health services. It's also in the process of building a psychiatric Emergency Room.
Everything else, "all of the acute services, primary care, or anything else that's outside of mental health" is now called Claxton Hepburn Medical Campus, "and that is operated and managed by Carthage Area Hospital," explained Jessica Bowline, a spokesperson for the North Star Health Alliance, which includes Claxton-Hepburn and Carthage Area Hospital.
The hospitals made this deal for Carthage to start managing all non-psych services in Ogdensburg last year, because Claxton-Hepburn was in over $30 million dollars of debt. In this new configuration, revenue from the mental health hospital and lease payments from Carthage Area Hospital will help pay off that debt.
Bowline says initially, there was a lot of confusion about the change.
"And [it was] even unsettling for a lot of the community because they thought, 'Oh my gosh, it's closing! You know, it's being taken over!' That word merger kept going around," said Bowline.
But for the public, Bowline says most of the changeover has happened behind the scenes.
"All the doctors are the same. All the employees are the same. Nothing has changed really other than the name and the signage that is in that part of the facility," she said.
Health clinics in Ogdensburg, Canton, Madrid, Hammond and Waddington are also now under Carthage Area Hospital management.
Part of Carthage's takeover was the intent to turn the new Claxton-Hepburn Medical Campus into a Critical Access Hospital (CAH), which requires actually decreasing the number of beds available, from roughly 90 to 25.
That sounds like a big change, but hospital officials say for decades now, the hospital census has hovered between 25 and 30, so it's in line with the needs of the community.
The reason to pursue a Critical Access Hospital classification is because it's a federal designation that allows rural hospitals to get better reimbursements and other benefits.
"So this Critical Access Designation helps us to preserve services and preserve jobs," said Bowling, "and it sets conditions for us to grow and to keep offering the services that we currently offer."
Seven other North Country hospitals have applied for and gotten that CAH designation, including Carthage. Bowline says the Claxton-Hepburn Medical Campus is just weeks away from officially becoming one, too.
"So all of the state surveys have been completed, but we're still waiting on the federal service surveys to be completed for us to be officially designated a Critical Access hospital," she explained.
Over the last twenty years, many North Country hospitals and healthcare providers have had to change the way they run to stay afloat financially.
Some have joined up with larger regional networks, like the St. Lawrence Health System affiliating with Rochester Regional Health, or CVPH in Plattsburgh joining the University of Vermont Health Network.
Claxton-Hepburn is part of a more localized, area network called the North Star Health Alliance. It's been around since 2015.
The NSHA consists of fivw hospitals and health care providers that share resources, to keep services in the North Country. Current members are Carthage Area Hospital, Claxton Hepburn Medical Center, Claxton Hepburn Medical Campus, North Country Orthopedic Group, and the Meadowbrook Terrace Assisted Living Facility.
Bowline says what the NSHA looks like in practice is a patient in Ogensburg needing a hip replacement. "And the ideal surgeon for her was a North Country Orthopedic Group surgeon. So rather than making this patient drive all the way to Watertown," she explained, the surgeon traveled to Ogdensburg and did the surgery there.
"The patient did not have to travel. The provider traveled," she said. So that's just one example of how we're really trying to to to offer these services locally and not have to send people to Syracuse or Utica or Rochester."
A new group of pediatricians from the Adolescent Health Association in Watertown recently joined the North Star Health Alliance. "So we'll have five more pediatricians within our system, which is very exciting," said Bowline.
North Star Pediatrics will be opening in Watertown in January. And Claxton-Hepburn Medical Campus should receive its official status as a critical access hospital not long after.