Vermont 100: Rutland Regional Health Services

by Ed BarnaLooking at all the medical services grouped under the holding company Rutland Regional Health Services’including the state’s second-largest hospital’it’s hard to imagine conditions back in 1896 when the state’s second hospital began operations.
It took six years for an invalid’s charitable bequest to go from vision to reality, for lack of the $5,000 to build one. The first location was a donated home, which had been a nursing home; four doctors ran the 10-room facility, which had one telephone and one bathroom.
It wasn’t until 1956 that the original in-town location was succeeded by a four-story, 155-bed structure, on outlying farmland. The transition to today’s comprehensive range of services might be said to have come in the early 1980s, when the hospital’s board of directors renamed it the Rutland Regional Medical Center and set up the holding company.
Today, the RRMC operates with a medical staff of more than 200, not counting its nurses, with the physicians covering 38 specialty area. It ranks number 14 on Vermont Business Magazine’s Vermont 100+, which appears in VBM's January 2012 issue. (SEE LIST HERE).
As in other areas of Vermont, the medical center has taken over official ownership of numerous physician practices, which frees the practitioners from many business-related responsibilities and lets them concentrate on practicing medicine.
Jill Jesso-White, their director of community & provider relations (editing note: do not change the ampersand to ‘and’), said that in addition to the hospital and its associated practices, the Health Services is affiliated with three community health centers; the five locations of the Vermont Sports Medicine Center, an orthopedic clinic and a clinic in Killington; because of a steady stream of ski-related injuries sent down from the Killington Ski Resort, the region is known for its first-class orthopedists); two assisted living facilities; and Kids on the Move, a pediatric rehabilitation program.
The Rutland Regional Medical Center has a major economic impact in the area, not even considering its value in attracting businesses to the area. The payroll, leaning toward better-paying jobs, numbered 1,530 in the last fiscal year, said Jesso-White’making it Rutland County’s largest employer. In addition, the last fiscal year’s operations were aided by 379 volunteers, who contributed 53,048 hours, she said (140 hours apiece).
The multiplier effects are hard to calculate, but the hospital has put together figures for donations, sponsorships and employee participation ($1,254,166), ‘community benefits’ such as free services and educational efforts ($2,807,161), and charity care ($4,341,795, not including shortfalls in Medicaid reimbursement). Within the hospital itself is the Bowse Trust, another source of funds for worthwhile medical causes.
Increasingly, the medical center is a source of patient self-management support and health education for the area, Jesso-White said’which are very important if preventive care is going to help curb the rise in health care costs. In that regard, the hospital has not only gone to electronic record-keeping, it is now in the process of overhauling its web site, to make it an easy-to-use source of reliable health information, she said.
People can check www.rrmc.org now and compare it with the new site when it goes online, probably in May, and see the difference for themselves. Even for those far from Rutland, that trip might be worth taking.