Company leases space at Boardman St. E’s

Officials say they don’t know what Select Specialty plans to do with North Side land it bought.

By WILLIAM K. ALCORN

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — Select Specialty Services has leased space in the new St. Elizabeth Health Center hospital in Boardman, a move that leaves a lot of vacant houses on the city’s North Side and Mahoning Valley Hospital scrambling for its life.

“It’s a David-and-Goliath story,” said Michael S. Senchak, president and chief executive officer of Mahoning Valley Hospital.

Select Specialties, a long-term acute care facility that has had space in St. Elizabeth Health Center on Belmont Avenue for some time, will now also occupy the seventh floor of the St. Elizabeth Boardman hospital, said Robert Shroder, president and chief executive officer of Humility of Mary Health Partners, parent of St. Elizabeth.

Calls made to Debbie Dashko, head of Select Specialty here, and Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams, a member of the HMHP board of trustees, were not returned.

Select Specialties had planned to build a multimillion-dollar facility on a 31⁄2-acre site near Stambaugh Auditorium off Fifth Avenue. The property contains numerous houses that were to be torn down, but that are now vacant and boarded.

It is not known what Select Specialty will do with the property and vacant homes.

Select Specialty said previously it had decided to build a stand-alone hospital to comply with a Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services regulation that was to go into effect this year.

Medicare and Medicaid wanted an ‘arms-length’ relationship between short-term, acute care facilities, such as St. Elizabeth, that refer patients to long-term, acute care step-down facilities, such as Select Specialties and Mahoning Valley Hospital.

If a long-term facility stayed within a hospital, it could only get 25 percent of its patients from the host hospital, Senchak said.

As long as that scenario existed, Mahoning Valley Hospital could survive financially, Senchak said.

The rules were changed again, however, and Select was not forced to relocate, plus it can get 50 percent of its patients from St. Elizabeth at both locations, Senchak said.

That’s the problem for Mahoning Valley Hospital, Senchak said.

He fears Select Specialty, a for-profit national corporation, will “cherry pick” the best insured patients and leave the indigent and Medicaid cases, which pay less, for Mahoning Valley.

Medicaid is a program, jointly funded by the states and the federal government, that reimburses hospitals and physicians for providing care to qualifying people who cannot finance their own medical expenses.

In a letter Monday to Mahoning Valley Hospital employees and medical staff, Senchak said Shroder told him late in the afternoon Nov. 30 that the lease agreement with Select Specialty had been approved.

The seventh floor of St. Elizabeth Boardman was originally to be leased to Akron Children’s Hospital. Akron Children’s, however, bought Forum Health Beeghly Medical Park in Boardman as a location for its Mahoning Valley pediatric care center.

Senchak said he also submitted a proposal to lease the seventh floor of St. Elizabeth Boardman Health Center for a limited period of time until St. Elizabeth’s business grows and it needs the space.

Also, Senchak is constructing a free-standing, $12 million hospital just over a mile from St. Elizabeth Boardman on South Avenue, which is already under roof.

In his letter to staff and physicians, Senchak said Humility of Mary Health Partners’ decision will have a “severe impact on our future viability.”

He said meetings are scheduled with Huntington Bank, which provided the financing for the new Mahoning Valley Hospital, the Murphy Contracting Co., which is building the facility, and other parties of interest, to determine a course of action.

alcorn@vindy.com