Good morning. This week we take a closer look at nonprofits targeting financially struggling providers for takeovers, plus news about how misuse of opioid settlement funds could hit Philadelphia, and how more out-of-state patients are now coming to Pennsylvania for abortions.
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— Aubrey Whelan and Abraham Gutman, Inquirer health reporters Abraham Gutman and Aubrey Whelan.
Our big story this week is an inside look at Imperium, a fast-growing Reading nonprofit that has been buying up struggling health and human services providers. Its latest target is Resources for Human Development, a Philadelphia-based organization that’s losing $10 million this fiscal year.
The financial crisis made RHD very attractive to Imperium, whose CEO, Ryan Smith, is using a computer program to comb through 990 nonprofits to select the weakest ones for acquisition.
My colleague Harold Brubaker tells the story of how RHD’s management lost control of the 54-year-old agency that’s respected for serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and providing behavioral health services. And while the deal is still pending, RHD’s board of directors was rapidly replaced and is now led by a former Imperium executive whose annual compensation exceeds $850,000.
Imperium has made 37 acquisitions in 12 states over the past eight years, boosting revenue by $358 million. (It has also boosted its president’s pay: Smith makes $1.3 million a year, more than the CEO of a large Philadelphia nonprofit in the same field.)
Imperium has said its acquisitions are a way for struggling providers to become financially self-sufficient by helping them build out their back-office infrastructure while still allowing them to maintain some independence. But some providers bought by Imperium say that hasn’t always been the case. One North Carolina organization was $400,000 in debt after the acquisition and had to pay Imperium’s legal fees every month.
“They sell you, we help you, we upgrade you, we get you on our system,” the organization’s former director told Harold, “but at the end of the day you’re still paying them money, and you’re paying them with interest.”
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Philadelphia has the highest infant mortality rate of any large city in the country, and a new program aims to change that by paying 250 pregnant women in Philadelphia $1,000 a month, no strings attached. Philly Joy Bank is modeled after a similar program linked to reducing premature births, the leading cause of infant deaths.
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Millions of dollars in opioid settlement funds allocated to Philadelphia were earmarked for a revitalization project in Kensington, the neighborhood hit hardest by the opioid crisis. But last week, a state commission that oversees how the money is spent ruled that it wasn’t an appropriate use of the funds. In related news, Aubrey spoke to addiction treatment experts about the services he expects from another big project in the city: a $100 million addiction treatment center and shelter.
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Tower Health’s credit rating has been downgraded for the second time in less than a month, Harold reports, after the Berks County nonprofit health system announced a major bond restructuring that Standard & Poor’s described as a “difficult restructuring” — a claim Tower has countered by saying it has laid out a “clear path to profitability.”
Today’s big numbers: 3,311.
The number of out-of-state residents who received abortions in Pennsylvania in 2022. Roe v. Wade It was rejected. That’s a 41% increase from last year.
The vast majority of abortions in Pennsylvania are performed by Pennsylvanians, but as other states enact increasingly restrictive abortion laws, Pennsylvania has become a “critical access point” for patients from the central U.S., as my colleague Sarah Ganz reports.
Ohio patients led the surge in out-of-state abortion seekers: After Pennsylvania implemented its six-week abortion ban, 1,378 Ohioans received abortions in Pennsylvania in 2022, up from just 557 the year before.
Delaware had the second-highest number of patients from outside the state, with 891 people receiving abortions in the state in 2022, followed by West Virginia and New Jersey.
Each week we will highlight the results of inspections at different hospitals in the region, and this week the focus is on Lower Bucks Hospital: Two on-site inspections carried out at Bristol Hospital between October 2023 and March 2024 found no issues.
Health researcher Tanisha Belton, senior manager of research initiatives at CHOP’s PolicyLab, first learned about sickle cell disease when she was 12 years old, when her twin sister was born and diagnosed with the painful blood disorder.
Since 2018, Belton has been working on a project aimed at helping young people with sickle cell disease manage their disease on their own. She is testing the effectiveness of a mobile app and program that pairs patients with local health workers who also have sickle cell disease.
So far, the community health workers have been well-received, she told her colleague Wendy Ruderman: “I think people feel a little more at ease knowing there’s someone out there who feels the same way they do.”
Former Johnson & Johnson executive Michael Snead will become chairman-elect of Thomas Jefferson University’s board of trustees, which oversees the operations and budgets of the university, Jefferson Health and Jefferson Health Plans’ insurance business.
He will take up the role next year, succeeding Patricia Wellenbach, president and CEO of the Please Touch Museum in West Philadelphia, the first woman to serve as president.
Snead most recently served as executive vice president of global corporate affairs and chief communications officer for J&J. He also serves on the boards of several organizations, including the Princeton-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Wayfair and WHYY in Philadelphia.
During a miserable heat wave like last week’s, most attention is focused on the extreme temperatures outside, while those lucky enough to have air conditioning hunker down indoors and impulsively turn down the thermostat.
But what if you don’t have air conditioning or the money to keep it on? Without air conditioning, being indoors during a heatwave can be dangerous, especially in a place like Philadelphia, where there are fewer trees and older homes, making indoor temperatures even higher.
A recent study from Drexel University highlighted existing research on the dangers of this understudied phenomenon, which can lead to cardiac and respiratory problems, an increased risk of blood clots and kidney damage.
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