A new medical office complex to be built by Bon Secours on the former campus of Westhampton School will be home to a collaborative pediatric outpatient program by Bon Secours and the Children's Hospital of Richmond at VCU. (Photo by Tharon Giddens)
Collaborative ties between two metro Richmond health care provider powerhouses were strengthened on Wednesday with the announcement of a new joint pediatric care initiative with Bon Secours Richmond and the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU.
Pediatric outpatient specialty care will be offered at a new Bon Secours medical office building on the old Westhampton School property. A March 2019 groundbreaking is planned for the facility, a three story, 55,000-square-foot building slated for a fall 2020 completion. The facility will be a home to specialties including cardiology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, general surgery, nephrology, neurology, neurosurgery, pulmonology and urology, according to a release. There will be no primary care offices at the facility.
Pediatrics is a natural collaborative opportunity, a blend of VCU’s academic platform with the Bon Secours community care model, says Toni Ardabell, CEO of Bon Secours Virginia Health System. “We were both excited about doing something together there,” she says.
The collaboration allows for coordinated, cooperative care, but each program remains independent. There’s no financial sharing structure, so functions including billing, salaries and insurance will be handled independently. Physicians will maintain dual offices, says David Marcello, the director of hospital medicine at Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU.
A patient’s electronic medical record can be shared with both Bon Secours and VCU, likely via a third-party site, says Marcello. That will allow, for instance, a VCU doctor to immediately access a Bon Secours patient’s record should they show up in a VCU emergency room instead of having to call and get the record and waiting for approvals, says Marcello.
VCU Health and Bon Secours have several partnerships already underway, including joint sponsorship of the GRTC Pulse bus rapid transit service along Broad and Main streets, a thoracic surgery practice at Bon Secours St. Mary’s Hospital, and a joint effort with Virginia Premier Health Plan to offer health insurance in central Virginia through the Affordable Care Act exchange in 2019.
“This will bring us even closer together,” says Marcello.
Marcello noted that a previous collaborative effort between Bon Secours and VCU occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, but “sort of fell apart for various reasons.”
The collaborations reflect a trend in health care nationally, says Marcello. He says equality is a driving factor behind the trend, that it’s a better model in terms of quality outcomes, education and research and, most crucially, can improve the health of patients.
“People are realizing you can’t do things alone anymore,” he says.
Marcello notes that VCU also has partnerships with metro Richmond’s other major health care provider, HCA Richmond, including neonatal critical care at the HCA Chippenham Hospital neonatal intensive care unit.
Ardabell cites a collaborative effort in mitigating childhood asthma that involves partners including Bon Secours, HCA, VCU and the Richmond Health District. Richmond ranks high nationally in cases of childhood asthma, and it made sense to take a collaborative approach.
“In today’s world, we need to work together with everyone in terms of the good of our community,” says Ardabell.