What They’re Watching: Monica Bourgeau, Allevant Solutions

Monica Bourgeau is the Vice President of Business Development for Allevant Solutions. She joins us in this edition of “What They’re Watching” to discuss sustaining critical access hospitals.

“I work for a company called Allevant Solutions that was developed by Mayo Clinic and Select Medical and we work with critical access hospitals to develop their transitional care or swing bed programs. And so one of the biggest challenges that we see in the rural markets is just keeping critical access hospitals open. You know, these are our safety net providers that are a lot of times the largest employer in the community and they’re having a hard time keeping their doors open. What’s exciting is our program helps them to bring their patients back after an acute care episode at a PPS hospital to provide that transitional or swing bed care after the acute care episode. And so it ends up with better results for the patients.

We work with critical access hospitals to partner with their PPS referral partners to create those transitions of care to bring patients back to the local communities. So, we not only help develop those partnerships but we also help the critical access hospitals feel more confident in taking more complex patients because they already have on-site radiology, on-site laboratory, on-site PR — they’re very well equipped to handle those patients and sometimes it’s just a little bit of extra training or expertise to be able to accommodate them.

I grew up in rural Montana and my family still lives in rural Montana and so I know how important healthcare is to them and how difficult it is for them to, you know, get to see your provider. And so if those critical access hospitals close you know it means people can die unfortunately or they’re not getting the health care that they need to stay alive and stay healthy.”