Marianna Harris might never have returned the voice mail.
Fortunately, Harris, who’s the administrator of the Webster County Community Hospital in Red Cloud, Neb., had been tipped off: Someone from the Helmsley Charitable Trust would be calling to offer her hospital a chance to apply for a sizable grant.
Had she not been told, she said, she might have thought the caller was a researcher or a salesman.
“It was just a gentleman on the phone,” Harris said. “He didn’t even say what his name was.”
Harris is glad she called back.
After receiving a nearly half-million-dollar grant, the hospital now has a state-of-the-art digital mammography machine, along with a “spalike” waiting room with plush chairs instead of a cold, sterile setting.
The grant also paid for a week’s worth of training for the hospital’s two full-time mammography technicians.
Women from the south-central Nebraska town no longer have to drive 45 minutes to Hastings to take advantage of the technology, and the number of mammographies performed at the hospital has increased 33 percent in the past year.
“It was almost too good to be true,” Harris said. “It was just a miracle.”
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust has distributed $117 million in similar grants to hospitals across Nebraska, northwest Iowa, North and South Dakota, western Minnesota and Wyoming. Nebraska entities alone have received $13.5 million in recent years.
The trust, to which the late real estate mogul Leona Helmsley left more than $5 billion, gives to many causes, including health and medical research, education, conservation and those living in poverty.
Consultants hired by the trust found that the Upper Midwest received 1.3 percent of all philanthropic dollars that went to health care. Most of that — 80 percent — went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
“That didn’t leave much for health care in Alma, Neb., or those small places. They need help too,” said Shelley Stingley, director of the trust’s rural health care program, based in Sioux Falls, S.D.
“So that’s why they chose this area of the country,” she said. “If we could prove things work here, it can work anywhere in America or around the world.”
Most of the Helmsley grants in Nebraska have gone toward digital mammography, which studies have found to be better than film-screen mammography in screening women who are under age 50, are premenopausal or have dense breast tissue.
“They’re just beautiful images,” said Jo Burnham, director of radiology at York General Hospital. The difference between the image on a film mammogram and a digital one, she said, is amazing.
“Every digital mammogram that is performed here is read by a computer, then the images are marked with ‘concerning areas’ for the radiologist,” Burnham said. “It’s a double read on every mammogram.”
Radiologists, she said, also are able to manipulate the image to make it darker or lighter to better see potential trouble spots. (The grant also funded new computer workstations for the radiologists.)
Offering the digital exams in York has kept patients from leaving, Burnham said. Before the equipment came in mid-2010, she said, “we saw a decline in our numbers. I knew people were going to Lincoln. They were calling and having their records permanently sent” to other offices.
Keeping money in rural communities is one of the goals of Helmsley officials, said Stingley, who is from Allen, Neb. When people leave a town for a procedure, she said, the money they spend elsewhere isn’t helping the town’s hospital stay open to handle emergencies or offer other services. Adding digital mammography, she said, “will help women in their community and it will help the health community, too, to keep the doors open in the clinics and the hospitals.”
The grants also help address problems that are unique to small towns. At Brown County Hospital in Ainsworth, Neb., a local dentist who also is a pharmacist must come in at the end of his day to review medications that have been given to inpatients, said the hospital’s CEO, Shannon Sorensen. With an e-pharmacy program, paid for with a $450,000 grant over three years, pharmacists in Sioux Falls can review medication orders against patients’ charts 24 hours a day. It’s another layer of protection, Sorensen said.
The dentist/pharmacist “still comes over every day,” she said. “We still have that live interaction. … The program is not designed to take the place of anybody. It’s only meant to be a backup to it.”
Keeping small towns’ hospitals healthy is important, said John Roberts, the executive director of the Nebraska Rural Health Association.
“The hospital is the first- or second-largest employer for the community,” Roberts said. “Any investment we can make in that helps maintain jobs in a lot of these communities.”
Roberts said the Helmsley outreach is welcomed and rare.
“It’s been a real boon to a lot of our facilities in Nebraska,” he said. “Because they’re smaller, (grantees) have less access to grants.”
Aside from the digital mammography, $2.7 million has gone to 14 Nebraska sites for monitoring equipment — motion detectors, bed sensors, impact sensors — that helps elderly people stay in their homes, and $2 million has paid for the e-pharmacy program.
In northwest Iowa, $3.9 million has gone to the e-pharmacy program, elder care and e-emergency, which hooks rural hospitals to a physician in Sioux Falls via two-way video equipment. The doctor can help the on-site nurse begin treatment of an emergency-room patient.
Omaha World Herald
Published Tuesday December 20, 2011
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402-444-1109, bob.glissmann@owh.com
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