AristaCare at Meadow Springs, a Plymouth Meeting nursing home that specializes in patients who need ventilators to help them breathe, has started doing a key lung procedure in-house that used to require patients to be transferred to a hospital.
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The effort is part of a broad trend in healthcare to provide more care outside of hospitals, which are the most expensive sites of care.
Meadow Springs’ goal in doing the lung-clearing procedures in-house is reducing the number of times its residents are hospitalized, the facility’s administrator Rob Nealon said.
Keeping residents in the facility benefits Meadow Springs financially even though it doesn’t charge for the treatment because it doesn’t lose revenue to hospitals, Nealon said. It’s also better for residents to avoid difficult transitions and long hospital stays, he said.
The treatment, called a bronchoscopy, uses suction tubing with video to go deep inside a patient’s lungs to clear out secretions and mucus plugs that make it hard for ventilator patients to breath, said Lejoy Mathew, respiratory director for the facility.
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The nursing home with 153 licensed beds has the capacity to care for 72 people on ventilators.
AristaCare did its first bronchoscopy in February and has done four more since then, Mathew said.
Patients who are dependent on ventilators often have a chronic respiratory disease, neuromuscular or neurodegenerative diseases, or traumatic brain injuries.
The company, based in Cranford, N.J., also owns AristaCare at East Falls, another ventilator facility it acquired in 2024, and plans to start doing bronchoscopies there as well. The East Falls facility has 66 beds.
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