Industrial medical service a lucrative business source
Industrial medical service a lucrative business source
Hospital provides one-stop shop for industry
Occupational medicine can be a good source of income for your rehabilitation program, as well as a continuing source of referrals for your hospital's medical and ancillary services.
That's why the rehabilitation department at St. Francis Hospital in Greenville, SC, has set up a division, Business Health Services, that provides traditional occupational rehab services, and more.
Employers pay for the preventive and health screening services. Everything else is paid for by worker's compensation, points out Bill Munley, MHSA, CRA, administrator of rehabilitation and the Vitality Center.
In South Carolina, worker's compensation is reimbursed at 87.5% of full charges, which makes it a lucrative business, he adds.
"The market is tight. Each individual service is not really lucrative, but if you provide high-quality services and have a high volume, you can do pretty well," adds Cindy Kress, MS, director of Business Health Services.
In addition to traditional work hardening, preventive, wellness, and health promotion services, St. Francis provides on-site physical examination, drug screening, nursing services, and physician services at about 100 Greenville work sites, including several large manufacturing facilities.
The rehab department has recently hired a physician for its industrial medicine clinic who will treat injuries from the onset.
Many of the services St. Francis provides are not thought of as traditional rehab services. "But if you can get one piece of it, you can pull in the rest of it. Because of our wellness programs, we got a lot of requests for other services and saw the potential to create a full occupational medicine product line," Kress says.
St. Francis Vitality Center, the rehab center's wellness and fitness component, has performed preventive, wellness, and health promotion services for businesses for many years. These services have included health fairs, nutrition classes, and cholesterol education.
"Over the years, businesses were not willing to put a lot of resources into providing those services, but they were more interested in preventive services as they related to the occupational medicine side," Kress says.
For instance, state and federal regulations require pre-placement physicals, hearing tests, vision screening, and pulmonary function tests as they relate to work environments. The regulations also require that workers be monitored over time.
"Employers were asking us for those types of services because we were already providing health promotion activities. We decided to move toward a one-stop shop for businesses. We wanted to be someone who could provide all the wellness and occupational medicine services," Kress says.
St. Francis already provided many services employers wanted, but the pieces were scattered. Early this year, the hospital put all services under one umbrella, Business Health Services.
"We're creating a clinic, staffed by our physicians, at one of our hospitals that will take acute injuries from employers. With the other pieces, we have a full continuum of care of work-related services," Kress says.
Having a one-stop shop for all the health needs of an employer can bring in other business, Kress points out.
For instance, drug screens don't bring in big money, but if you take care of screening a company's employees, decision makers there call on you for more services, Kress adds.
"It rounds out the overall continuum. We all are looking at moving to community-based health care. We can't see a way to access more of the community than in employer groups. If you're working with them, you are having an effect on the overall health of the community," Kress says.
Many employers are moving toward total disability management and will cover injuries whether or not they occur on the job.
"However they were injured, they still need to return to work as quickly as possible," Kress says.
For more on St. Francis' business health services, contact Cindy Kress at (864) 255-1864.
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