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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Motion Picture Television Fund Mends Industry Ties

The Motion Picture & Television Fund continued to make amends with the entertainment industry and the surrounding Valley community with a recent announcement that it will open a 12-bed inpatient geriatric psychiatric unit on its Woodland Hills campus in partnership with UCLA Health System. The decision comes weeks after the fund, known for its Hollywood clients, reversed course on a previous decision to close the facility, which angered residents and community leaders. In February, the fund said it would keep 40 skilled nursing beds open. Though the beds still are costing the Fund more money than they generate, the Fund said it was a deficit it could absorb. The announcement on Feb. 14 puts more of the 136 beds at the Woodland Hills facility to use for both the entertainment industry and the community. While industry members will get first dibs on the available beds, the unit also will be open to the community. “This historic linkage with the UCLA Health System is another key piece in the larger strategy we have developed for our organization,” CEO Robert L. Beitcher said in a statement. Taking a facility that was practically written off, Beitcher took over from former CEO Dr. David Tillman in July with a strategy to keep some of the long-term care beds open, revamp the finances of MPTV and figure out ways to fill the beds on the Woodland Hills campus with a range of services. The fund is reportedly still working on a bigger deal to attract a partner to fill the remaining empty beds. According to published reports, that partner could be Louisville, Ky.-based Kindred Healthcare Inc., whose specialty is long term acute care, a service designed for critically ill patients who need to be hospitalized for more than 20 days. “Among our many goals, we are focused on building a health care campus capable of delivering a broad set of services to our industry members and, selectively, to the San Fernando Valley community,” Beitcher said in a statement. The Motion Picture & Television Fund and UCLA will co-brand the new unit. Its medical director will hold a faculty position at the UCLA School of Medicine and participate in the academic and research activities of the university as well. The fund’s partner in this latest effort is the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital of UCLA, a 17-bed inpatient facility directed by Dr. Thomas Strouse. Dr. Strouse said the facility will serve all adults over 55 with a variety of behavioral disturbances beyond Alzheimer’s, including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and addiction. He said it will be especially helpful to have the unit housed within an acute care hospital. Older patients often have medical problems in addition to their psychiatric issues that can complicate their treatment, he said. For example, thyroid disease often manifests itself as depression, said Dr. Strouse, so having a facility that can diagnose and treat that on the same site will be ideal. “There are very few such specialized units in the country and very few in Southern California,” Strouse added. “This should be a big service to the community.” Heritage Hits Bump with New Model The Heritage Provider Network discovered this past week that being a pioneer is sometimes fraught with peril. Trying to attract new patients to its Pioneer Accountable Care Organization, a new model of care being tested by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Heritage ran into some political turmoil from area doctors who objected to the wording of letters sent by the organization to their patients. “I think it’s deceitful and basically misleading,” Dr. Harris Wasser, a Simi Valley internist, told the Ventura County Star. Dr. Wasser and other physicians fear that the organization — a large multi-specialty medical group with 700,000 patients enrolled mostly in HMOs — will want to siphon off their patients. Heritage, along with 31 other health systems across the country, was chosen by CMS in January to pilot the accountable care model of care in a three-year experiment. It is up to these systems to attract Medicare patients who have never been enrolled in managed care and offer them more coordinated medical care in the hopes of saving CMS money. The most innovative feature of the pilot is that ACOs that can save CMS money will be permitted to share in the savings. By the third year, they can keep more than half the savings. If the model works as intended, it could pave the way for a new national physician payment model. To help the ACOs enroll patients, CMS makes names of potential Medicare patients available to the Pioneer ACO organizations, but leaves it up to the organization to convince the patients to join. Heritage sent letters to prospective patients starting in early February, which some people say not surprisingly confused patients and irritated the doctors who treat those patients. Heritage said it is working closely with CMS to “make sure questions are answered in a timely manner.” The organization also said it has been conducting town hall meetings with area physicians and Medicare beneficiaries to explain the Pioneer ACO model. The company said the goal is to educate the community that the program is not an HMO, that participation in the ACO is voluntary and that it does not reduce any Medicare benefits. In an interview in January, Dr. Richard Merkin, founder, president and CEO of Heritage, said he expected some confusion from patients, resistance from independent physicians, and a tall order convincing patients that getting their care through an ACO will be better for them than receiving random, ad-hoc care from multiple doctors and hospitals who may or may not communicate regularly with each other. To attract patients, he said, “We have to be the best and act like the Ritz Carlton. We will have to make the experience we provide overwhelmingly desirable.” Heritage promised “much more communication to both the seniors and doctors about these programs in the future.” Staff Reporter Judy Temes can be reached at (818) 316-3124 or at [email protected].

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