April/May 2000

Facility Profile: INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe Rehabilitation Network

By Liz Finch

INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe Rehabilitation Network offers community-centered care in the heartland.

When the INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe Rehabilitation Network was created, the Oklahoma City-based facility took the name of the Native American Olympian and local hero “as a good example to hold out to people who need to have hope for the future,” says Tom Rice, president and COO of INTEGRIS Southwest Medical Center and INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center. INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe is licensed as part of INTEGRIS Southwest. “We thought it would be unique to have a name that stood out and distinguished us from other leased rehab programs in the state.”

The name not only distinguishes the facility from others, it also is representative of INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe’s dedication to its local community. The network has continued to extend its inpatient and outpatient services throughout the state, and is adding to its programs consistently to further support and incorporate its community.

Al Moorad, MD, has been the medical director of INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe since its inception, and his personal mission has influenced much of the facility’s makeup.

“I did not want people with any kind of injury to have to leave the state and go anywhere else for rehab,” he says. “Those born and raised here should be able to access the highest quality of care close to home and achieve the best outcome after a major injury. I want people to feel like they can come here after a major injury and we can make them independent again, at their maximum level of function.”

That high quality of care can be found at INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe’s three-story facility, which is equipped with an indoor aquatic center, a 4,200-sq-ft gymnasium, a pediatric unit and gym, a resource library, an educational conference center, and transitional living apartments on each floor. There are 108 beds available on the campus, plus services at INTEGRIS Southwest, where two floors are fully dedicated to rehab.

Inpatient services also are available at INTEGRIS Baptist, which has 23 beds as well as physical, occupational, speech, and psychological therapy services. INTEGRIS Clinton Regional Hospital, a 10-bed unit in nearby rural Clinton, provides inpatient rehab for orthopedic injuries and stroke victims. Outpatient services also are spread throughout the Oklahoma City metropolitan area.

Community-Focused Services

The network serves patients from Oklahoma and the surrounding states, and admits more than 2,000 patients annually. At each of its locations, INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe offers team-based, personal care for patients in all stages of rehab. In addition to traditional therapy services—physical, occupational, speech, and recreational therapy, and vocational rehab—the network offers education for patients and their families to improve understanding of illness and manage necessary life changes, individual and group counseling, an amputee program, a 24-hour rehab nursing program, and postsurgical rehab, as well as a number of other specialty programs, like Bright Path, the pediatric rehab program, and a hippotherapy program. Many of the specialty programs are designed to reach out to the rural communities in the state and utilize the resources of those communities in conjunction with the resources at INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe.

“Oklahoma is a pretty rural state and the necessity to get to those areas is pretty overwhelming,” says Don Burman, vice president of INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe. “There is a great deal of excitement about how Jim Thorpe supports its neighbors.”

One program that incorporates community resources is the driver assessment and rehabilitation program, which is staffed by state-certified driving educators and registered, licensed occupational therapists. A local partner in the program donated the custom van that is used to reteach driving skills to patients.

INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe works with local athletes as well, providing trainers on the field at student football or basketball games who can act immediately in the event of injury. The network also works with the Oklahoma City Blazers and is one of four clinics slated by retired NFL players for rehab in the United States.

Future expansion for the network includes an all-day hospital set up for ambulatory medicine, where patients can come for 8 hours a day instead of being sent to a nursing home. INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe holds regular support group meetings with community leaders and therapists, and is in the process of starting a free rehab clinic for those without resources to get prosthetics and orthotics.

Although most of those who come to INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe are treated for orthopedic conditions, stroke patients make up the next largest diagnostic group. In order to work more closely with them, it is trying to get a grant that will allow the network to examine stroke patients and help prevent the reoccurrence of strokes.

“Once you have had one stroke, you are 80% more likely to have another,” Burman says. “We want to do something about that, because stroke is the third leading cause of death in the United States.” INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe will be applying to be designated a member of the National Stroke Association and is collaborating with facilities in Ohio and Kansas on being a good partner in educating the community.

“We want to help people change their lifestyle and recognize the symptoms of stroke. And since getting drugs into the system in the beginning stages of stroke can reverse the damage, we need to teach people that every second counts. We must get an awareness campaign going, and we need to have a protocol that is community-based,” Burman says.

In the case of very remote communities, INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe has relied on advanced technology to make progress. Thanks to a grant for rural health care using telemedicine, INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe was able to work with the Hugo Independent School System and Choctaw Hospital in nearby Choctaw County to help provide speech pathology services to students.

“Choctaw County has the highest incidence in the state of low birth-weight babies and women receiving less care during the first trimester of pregnancy, in addition to a high turnover of staff and horrific case loads,” Burman says. “The school system was having quite a problem in getting qualified therapists who could support the kids because of the feelings of isolation, and lack of clinical support for personal growth, and collaboration on care that are common in a rural area. We were able to use telemedicine equipment to consult and co-treat students for speech language issues. This project has been tremendously received, because it is the kind of stuff people want to hear about.

“We have to take a closer look at these rural outposts that have terrific folks in the community who feel unsupported and find a way to help them with telemedicine or the Internet,” Burman says.

The network also has made a grant proposal that will allow it to take advantage of federal funding to help train neurologically impaired patients in productive ways. “We want to help them participate in their communities. We are making an effort to help people get back into the mainstream, back into the workforce, using technology as a base to support people in that,” Burman says. “That is what the involvement of a rehab network can mean in the community,” he continues. I am really excited about giving back to the community, because we have a lot of people out there helping us.”

Maintaining Financial Solvency

Even with its tremendous community support, INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe certainly has its challenges, and many of them are tied to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (BBA). When Burman was hired in 1999, he examined the upcoming changes wrought by the BBA and tried to determine what the network should do in order to be a survivor instead of a casualty. The answer was creating additional venues of care, and an analysis of discharges from the network in a 1-year period provided overwhelming evidence in support of development of less traditional services for rehab providers. Burman says the key to dealing with the challenges of the BBA is to remain flexible and creative, while still providing quality care on a financially sound basis. “We saw that we needed an integrated delivery system for postacute services to support patients into the proper venue,” he says. “The first of these new venues to be developed is the center for ambulatory medicine, where the whole purpose is to help introduce patients who were not traditional patients but still had a need for rehab services “We know there are patients with a need for nursing, pharmaceuticals, social services, and case management, but because rehab is so focused on neurology and orthology, those patients were going to physician’s offices or staying in inpatient acute care areas. We brought a center onto the Southwest campus and licensed this facility as a comprehensive outpatient rehab facility. Now we can do traditional rehab but get paid for nursing and social services, and get paid for pain patients who traditionally go under oncology. We have a whole new group of patients we can help serve.”

The second venue that Burman deems critical to the future of rehab providers has been the creation of a long-term acute care (LTAC) hospital. The network opened its own 26-bed hospital-within-a-hospital in April, and Burman says it “will allow physicians in our system to be able to move patients from very costly acute patient venues to much less costly ones and still have control over their patients.

“LTACs have one basic rule—that annually the average length of stay for patients must be 25 days or longer,” he says. “For folks looking into the future, the creation of an LTAC allows them to continue to do rehab in a system where they will be better reimbursed. This will mitigate a large amount of uncompensated care found on the acute inpatient side and have a tremendous impact on our financial viability.”

Just as the network makes people a priority, so Moorad recognizes that having the right staff is key to his goal. He gives tremendous credit to his large staff, which includes many specialized therapists.

“We attract great therapists who want to come to INTEGRIS Jim Thorpe,” Rice says, and Burman concurs.

“We have the greatest, most caring and compassionate and dedicated staff anywhere in the country who live and work here and we could not do it without them,” he says.

“I have been all over the country looking at rehab units and what makes us stand out is the dedication of our team to the community—every individual from the cooks to the housekeepers to the dietitian are proud of this community and give back everything they have,” Moorad says. “They touch people’s lives and make a difference.”

LOOKING FOR EXPERT ADVICE? Experts here are available to answer all your questions! Please contact us for more information about this feature, or to become an expert.

MEDIA CENTER Interactive Media  Archives  · November 2008  · October 2008  · August/September 2008  · Fall 2008 Product Directory  · July 2008  · June 2008  · May 2008  · April 2008  · March 2008  · January/February 2008  · All Archives  Newsletter  · Rehab Today Resources Classifieds Calendar Consumer Resources Media Kit Advertiser Index EAB Reprints Submit an Article