Hamilton’s Community Me-morial Hospital, located at 150 Broad Street, recently decided to enter into a corporate partnership with Crouse Hospital located in Syracuse. Under this new “passive parent” relationship, Community Memorial and Crouse will operate independently of each other, with both hospitals receiving mutual benefit from the new relationship.

As Community Memorial is a smaller, primary care hospital, connecting with a larger tertiary care center enables Community Memorial to provide its patients with a higher level of care in a more efficient, timely manner. Af-ter finalizing the partnership later this month, Crouse specialists will be able to come to Community Memorial Hospital and patients will also be sent to Crouse for treatment not offered in Hamil-ton. Additionally, as a larger orga-nization, Crouse has greater access to capital, technology and a higher level of IT, which it will be able to share with the staff and patients of Community Memorial.

Linking with Community Memorial is advantageous for Crouse because it provides the hospital with a greater number of patients in Syracuse’s highly competitive health care market that consists of Crouse Hospital, SUNY Upstate Hospital and St. Joseph’s Hospital. With this new partnership underway, Crouse has recently added its Chair of the Finance Committee and its CEO to the Board of Directors of Community Memorial.

The response to the partnership has been very positive so far and the staff of Community Memorial is optimistic about future plans for the hospital.

“We have a number of pro-grams that are in the cue and one of the first clinical programs we are going to be launching is with our ED (Emergency Depart-ment) and hospitalist programs,” President and CEO of Commu-nity Memorial Hospital and em-ployee of Crouse Hospital Sean M. Fadale said.

Currently, the Emergency De-partment of Community Memo-rial is primarily staffed by phy-sician’s assistants. Yet, Crouse is going to take over the ED and provide Community Memorial with physicians to create a mix of both physicians and physician’s assistants who will be available 24/7. Community Memorial also plans to expand its hospitalist program to be available 24/7 by January 1, 2013.

“The hope is that we could add more services for our patients … In reality, where healthcare is going is to create a balance of inpatient and out-patient admissions or procedures,” Fadale said.

Community Memorial also plans to adopt Crouse’s elec-tronic healthcare record some-time in 2013. Other future goals include establishing a larger multi-specialty clinic and add-ing more visiting specialists for outpatient surgery.

“With healthcare reform and ev-erything that is occurring, [the part-nership with Crouse] is something that we needed to do,” Fadale said. “It was the Board of Directors and medi-cal staff and a lot of different people who got around the table to really look at what we’re doing as an organization and where we wanted to go and that’s why we came up with the decision of Crouse–Crouse was the most like us when it came to culture and to fit.”

Contact Kerry Houston at [email protected].