Bergen County’s public hospital to extend addiction treatment

NorthJersey.com, 7/14/17

By Lindy Washburn

Executives of the nonprofit chosen to run Bergen County’s public hospital outlined their vision Friday for the 1,000-bed facility, saying they plan to extend addiction treatment beyond detox, enhance medical services and open the books to improve financial transparency.

Patients and visitors to the county hospital in Paramus, now known as Bergen Regional Medical Center, will see a new name – still to be chosen – when they enter the campus on Oct. 1, the day Care Plus Bergen takes over day-to-day operations.

But the core mission, of treating people with mental health and substance-abuse problems, as well as patients in its long-term care facility, will remain.

At a celebration at the County Administration building in Hackensack attended by more than 300 people, County Executive James J. Tedesco III said the decision was the most important of his first term, and “will help change the health-care landscape here in Bergen County.”

He detailed an “extremely rigorous, intensive, transparent and thorough process” that led to the selection of Care Plus Bergen from among seven applicants.

Care Plus Bergen – which will lease the facility from the Bergen County Improvement Authority – will have a new approach to the hospital’s mission, its executives said. Formed as a nonprofit partnership of Care Plus NJ, a community mental-health provider in northern New Jersey, and Integrity House, a Newark-based addiction-treatment provider with sites in four counties, it will integrate medical and mental-health care, and leverage its resources outside the hospital to help support patients after they are discharged.

The need is great: Last year, more than 308 people overdosed on drugs in Bergen County, including 247 on opioids, and 87 died. In January, Gov. Chris Christie declared the opioid epidemic in New Jersey a public-health crisis. Bergen Regional currently discharges more than 6,000 patients a year who’ve been detoxed through a stay of three to five days.

To help those patients sustain their recoveries, the new leadership will pay more attention to what happens after discharge, said Robert Budsock, CEO of Integrity House.  It will “leverage Integrity House’s 427 licensed long-term residential and halfway house beds to ensure a continuum of care that is required to effectively treat the chronic disease of addiction,” he said.

“Although detox can be the first step in the treatment process, it cannot be the only one,” Budsock said. “Our experience is that successful long term recovery must always require further attention in a licensed program.”

Medical care in the acute-care portion of the hospital will be subcontracted to Rutgers University Medical School. Rutgers-affiliated doctors already provide clinical services at hospitals around the state, and this will be the same arrangement, said Dr. Robert Johnson, medical school dean.

The school is hiring specialists to fill 25 full-time physician slots at the hospital in 2018, he said, with plans to increase the medical staff to 49 over the next few years. They will provide an array of specialty care – in surgery, neurology, ophthalmology – that has not previously been available.

In response to concerns expressed by some Bergen County legislators that Rutgers will use the Paramus campus as a foothold in Bergen County to allow RWJBarnabas Health, a large statewide health system with which Rutgers partners elsewhere, to expand, Johnson said that was not the case. The medical school and its doctors are not owned by RWJ Barnabas, he said, and “Barnabas does not intend to come here.”

The goal, Johnson said, is to better serve the population that currently uses the hospital, including many uninsured and under-insured patients.

It is also hoped that services for veterans can be expanded at the hospital, “so they have to travel less and wait less,” said Tracy Zur, chair of the Bergen County Board of Chosen Freeholders. Some veterans currently travel to East Orange for some of their care.

The freeholders were particularly proud of the contract with Care Plus Bergen, Zur said, because it “increased transparency, accountability and protection for both the employees and the patients.”

The contract “ensures we have access to financial documents and incident reports so we can make sure that implementation and performance measures are reaching satisfactory levels,” she said. Last year, The Record reported on dozens of incidents of alleged assaults on staff and patients, and OSHA cited the hospital for safety violations.

“We will be doing business with open books on the table,” said Joseph A. Masciandaro, CEO of Care Plus NJ.

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