Heather Drake Bianchi, founder of Drakos Urgent Care, is the founder and CEO of Drakos Clinical Dynamics, a healthcare services company based in Syracuse. Michael C. Backus is president and CEO of Oswego Health, a nonprofit healthcare system with locations throughout Oswego County.
During this year’s CenterState CEO economic forecast breakfast, CenterState President and CEO Robert Simpson shared harrowing statistics from the New York state community health indicator reports. With Micron joining our community and adding an estimated 100,000 people to our population, we can expect 38,000 additional emergency room visits every year and 10,000 more hospitalizations. We also need to add 100 more primary care physicians, 100 more dentists and 300 mental healthcare providers.
The demand to build our region’s healthcare infrastructure comes at a challenging time. Hundreds of thousands of healthcare professionals left their fields in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The American Medical Association predicts the U.S. will experience a shortage of 17,800 to 48,000 primary care physicians in the next 10 years (by 2034), plus a shortage of 21,000 to 77,100 non-primary care doctors.
This is a profound and complex problem. No single healthcare professional or organization is going to have the answers.
Instead, the way forward is for healthcare organizations to put aside old ideas about competition and come together as care collaborators. That is why we’re proposing a three-part initiative to address current healthcare issues in Central New York and prepare for the population explosion to come.
The first part of our proposal is the creation of a regional consortium that is actively planning for regional growth and increased healthcare needs now, not waiting for Micron to open the first Clay facility. The fact is that currently, there is an imbalance because our disjointed healthcare services are either underutilized or overutilized.
Collaboration starts with regular, clear communication. Healthcare organizations must proactively create and rethink opportunities to problem solve and develop ways to provide access and collaboration, focused on building healthcare infrastructure and meeting the significant needs of our community today and for the future. These conversations should include both clinical healthcare providers and organization administrators working together to ensure that the quality of medical care is outstanding, and the business foundations of our healthcare infrastructure are strong and sustainable.
We have seen firsthand how just one conversation can spark new ideas and partnerships. In December 2023, our organizations were brought together by CenterState CEO to discuss the future of healthcare in Central New York. That first meeting has led to ongoing conversations and the formulation of this three-part plan.
Second, we need state and regional partners to work with us to remove barriers to care. Ideally, the New York state Department of Health would help all of us plan care across our systems, especially as so many of us are dependent upon state assistance for capital investment. Bringing everyone together to craft the plan and then present it to funders would help all parties invest to the degree they can, while also maintaining their core being.
Similarly, just as healthcare systems need to be brought together to collaborate, healthcare providers and the care they offer patients are stronger when they work together across disciplines. For example, New York state allowed paramedics to provide essential care in emergency departments during the height of the pandemic — complementing the expertise of physicians, nurses, and physician assistants — and could change regulations to allow that collaboration to continue, as Colorado and Washington State have done for years.
The third and final piece of our proposal is a public awareness campaign to help everyone understand when they should go to their primary care provider, when they should go to an urgent care like those operated by Drakos or Oswego Health, or when they should go to a community hospital setting like Oswego Health via its emergency department for general medicine. The public is also a key partner in helping build an efficient, effective and sustainable healthcare infrastructure. We all have the power to help reduce wait times and stress on our healthcare providers and their organizations by going to the right place at the right time for care.
While there are daunting challenges ahead of us, we already have a wealth of healthcare resources in this community. In consideration of the next generation, we need to work together to provide the best healthcare to the community we love and to which we have dedicated our lives.