Model for Care
CENTER TWP — With VA Butler Healthcare's new Abie Abraham VA Clinic set to begin serving patients in less than two weeks, VA officials offered up a rare tour of the new facility on Friday, highlighting what the system believes will be the new model of veterans care.
David Cord, executive director of VA Butler Healthcare, called the new facility on Duffy Road — a sleek building featuring spacious public areas and state-of-the-art equipment — a leap forward when it comes to specialty care and outpatient services for the nearly 35,000 veterans who live within VA Butler Healthcare's five-county service area.
The system currently enrolls about 25,000 of those veterans, said Ken Kalberer, the VA's communications director, and that number is expected to eclipse 30,000 sometime next year.
The wide range of ages and health care needs within that group of veterans served by the VA Butler Healthcare means the system has worked hard to integrate and diversify its offerings, Cord said. But that work was often hampered or blunted by the aging New Castle Road facility.
“The needs vary greatly,” Cord said. “We have patients as young as 18 or 19 years old, and we have patients that are over 100 years old. That requires us to deliver care in a lot of sub-specialties, as well as primary care services across a broad spectrum.”
Cord said that the new clinic will offer not just an upgraded and modernized facility, but more opportunities to integrate specialty services from the VA system in Pittsburgh.That system already sends cardiologists to Butler for consultations with veterans here. But Dr. Rohnda Mough, who is chief of staff at VA Butler Healthcare and oversees all the system's clinical services, said expanding the number of visiting specialists and doing more to integrate and modernize how primary and specialty care, as well as mental health services, are delivered to veterans are initiatives that will be focused by the new facility.
“The idea is that the veteran comes here, and everyone comes to the veteran,” she said.The biggest leap forward in the new facility will essentially be logistical, Mough said, standing in one of the clinic's 10 “bullpen” areas where Patient Aligned Care Teams (PACT) will gather before they meet with patients. Each team is responsible for between 1,000 and 1,200 patients, and will include not only primary and specialty care health providers, but mental health specialists like psychologists and psychiatrists as well.“Mental and physical health are so interconnected, as we recognize that and want to help veterans understand that and focus on both aspects of health to promote their overall well-being,” said Mough.The new facility is entirely outpatient-based, and Mough said it also provides room for specialty care ranging from dental care and audiology to radiology and ultrasound services — another area in which VA Butler Healthcare is expanding its capabilities, Mough said.The PACTs will also include a team that is completely focused on womencare issues, and the facility has a special, private entrance for female veterans who are visiting the clinic for gender-specific care.For Sharon Parson, VA Butler Healthcare's nurse executive, perhaps the biggest leap forward provided by the new facility is its design efficiency.Unlike the New Castle Road campus, the new site will provide patients with easier access to the departments and services they most-often use. The building locates specialty services at the rear of the first floor, and groups medical and rehabilitation services together in a way that wasn't possible with the layout of the old campus.Parson oversees the VA's nursing staff and rehabilitation programs.“I think we'll be able to maximize the care that we'll be able to provide by utilizing the modern equipment and efficient space,” said Parson.It also will host a state-of-the-art aquatherapy program that is modeled on the services operated by the Pittsburgh Steelers and Penguins, Kalberer said.Parson said the program is useful for veterans working on pain control and assisted rehabilitation regimes, and dovetails nicely with the VA's chiropractic and acupuncture services.The system is also adding a pain clinic to its list of offerings at the new facility, Parson said, and she sees the pain management initiatives as an important part of the system's efforts to serve veterans, who often deal with post-surgical recovery for knee and hip procedures, chronic back pain and prosthetic limb training for amputees.With the new facility set to house the VA Butler Healthcare for the next two decades — an eternity when it comes to health care — Cord said the clinic's layout and aesthetics, which include large murals depicting military iconography that will make navigating the campus easier for visitors, represent the VA's vision for the future of veterans' care.“This gives us the opportunity to modernize the environment in which we provide care for our veterans,” Cord said. “We're at the point in providing care where we need space that makes it easy for veterans to get their outpatient care, and this space is ideal for that environment of care.”
