CHA To Consolidate Clinics To Cut Costs

The Cambridge Health Alliance will close six of its primary care facilities and merge them with existing clinics in an effort to decrease expenses in the face of massive state-imposed budget cuts, CHA announced in a press release Wednesday.

Over the next year, CHA will reduce full-time employee positions by 8 percent, through a combination of layoffs, early retirement, and reduced hours, according to the release.

The news caps a year of financial difficulties for the Alliance, which instituted a hiring freeze last February in the face of a mounting deficit and last October announced it would lose $55 million in funding for the fiscal year ending this June.

After the October announcement, CHA was in the process of laying off 300 employees and had already begun a strategic planning process to determine where costs could be cut.

CHA is a network of more than twenty hospitals and clinics in Cambridge, Somerville, and other communities north of Boston that serves 700,00 primary care patients. The Alliance receives 85 percent of its funding from state and federal sources, including Medicaid and Medicare.

Doug Bailey, chief communications officer for CHA, said these efforts will ensure the Alliance’s survival because they were planned in concert with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services and other state agencies that helped plan the state-wide cuts in October.

“As painful as parts of this are, and we’ve emphasized that we think we have a vision that takes us out to 2015 that focuses on providing services to poor communities of Cambridge,” Bailey said. “We’ve forged...a commitment of a partnership and adequate funding going forward—we’ve convinced the state of the necessity of our livelihood.”

Bailey said that every facility slated for closure is within half a mile of the site with which its services will merge and that the Alliance tried to target the least utilized, least cost-efficient sites for mergers.

But some of the mergers were necessitated by a lack of federal and state reimbursement, Bailey said. He cited CHA’s Whidden Hospital in Everett, Mass., which will reduce its number of inpatient psychiatric beds from eight to five.

“To maintain addiction services is to incur loses,” Bailey said.

Cambridge City Councillor Sam Seidel called CHA’s plan “a good-faith effort to consolidate without cutting core mission.”

Although it is unclear how much CHA can save through the proposed restructuring, Bailey said the Alliance hopes to cut $50 million in costs this year, and $100 million total by next year.

According to the press release, the proposed changes include ending inpatient pediatric services at the Teen Health Center in Cambridge and closing several ambulatory primary care centers, including two within the city limits—the North Cambridge Health Center, and the Riverside Health Center. The Cambridge Eye Center will also close.

Bailey said that the City of Somerville will be most affected by the cuts.

The Alliance will hold a series of three meetings next week—on Feb. 3, 4 and 5—to solicit public comment on the proposed restructuring.

Although Seidel praised the Alliance for frequently reporting its plans to the Council, he said it needed to improve its communication with the public.

“I am not alone in thinking that CHA needs to do a better job of keeping the public up to date in a realtime way,” he said.

—Staff writer Sarah J. Howland can be reached at showland@fas.harvard.edu.