Dr. Jill Owens Reflects on the Closure of BRMC and the Future of Community Healthcare

Written by Jill Owens, MD and published with permission

With the closure of Bradford Regional Medical Center (BRMC), I have been asked by several over the last few weeks to share my thoughts and to educate the public on how to navigate their healthcare needs without a hospital and specifically an emergency room in our community. This has been quite difficult for me as my emotions regarding all of this range from devastation to extreme anger.

BRMC was established almost 140 years ago and has been the healthcare hub and a leading employer for the region since. As many of you have heard me discuss in the past, hospitals needed to reinvent themselves over the last 2-3 decades, given all the changes in reimbursement and in the way patient care is delivered in the current environment. Unfortunately, what BRMC experienced was a complete gutting of all its services, starting with the surgical and procedural services that pay the bills. That put the hospital on life support and eventually cost it all the remaining essential services. And here we are.

I often wonder what would have happened had the board listened in March of 2006 when the physician medical staff of BRMC took a vote of no confidence against our leadership at the time. The hospital was thriving then with 5 general surgeons, 15 primary care physicians and several other specialists. And that was at a time when hospitals were making a profit. We weren’t and we should have been. And that mismanagement, compounded by some shady deals, put us squarely behind the eight-ball and in financial peril.

Most in our BRMC community know what happened next. A series of moves made in desperation that led us to where we are today. Some day you can buy the book. Sadly, along that road, there were multiple opportunities to turn things around, but corporate greed and leadership that didn’t value the local community’s needs, made those wins short-lived. During my short tenure as president, we cut the losses at BRMC in half and had a solid path to rebuilding. But unfortunately, it was not in line with overall vision of leadership and their long-term plan.

You may have noticed, I left politics out of this so far. Mostly because I truly hate politics and it’s my belief that the two-party extremes are ruining our country. That is especially true in healthcare. And maybe partly because, in the doctor’s office, I saw people from all political persuasions and came to realize that we’re all not that different when you dig down deep. I will say though, reading that one party or the other caused BRMC’s demise is not true. The Democrat-led accountable care act drove us into consolidation with larger systems. BRMC is a great example of ‘bigger is not better’.

The Republican-led Medicaid cuts aren’t exactly helping the reimbursement in small, rural communities where Medicaid is a major insurer. And unfortunately, all the politicians in Washington have taken the money out of physician reimbursement which allowed doctors to pay their nurses and staff and forced most into employment. This is probably the biggest driver of failure of the current system as independent doctors kept the hospital systems working for the patients and not their own greed. So really, neither party has done us any favors in my 26 years in healthcare.

I must also say that hearing our local, state and federal politicians get bashed over BRMC makes me angry as well. After I was asked to file a closure plan for BRMC in July of 2022, Representative Martin Causer came through with a $2 million grant to keep the lights on. I got a similar $1 million USDA grant that Congressman Glenn Thompson helped to secure in October of that same year to buy us more time. In 2023, when the rural health program was in jeopardy, our governor’s office sent their secretary of health to help me advocate in Washington for the program’s much needed reimbursement. And, since the building had been neglected for decades, both Senator Dush and Representative Causer, helped us get a $10 million dollar infrastructure grant to start to get the facility back into shape. And these are just the big items that both republican and democratic politicians have done to help BRMC survive as long as it did.

I guess I should also address one of the original questions—what should patients do if they need emergency care? Here’s my advice: