Health Care at Home — OSF St. Francis

OSF St. Francis Hospital and Medical Group in Escanaba have about 700 employees between them.

About 60 of those employees are doctors.

But the hospital’s number of beds is in flux at the moment.

Vice president of operations David Lord says it will drop to 25 beds this spring.

The change comes out of applying for Critical Access Hospital status.

That means a hospital is in a community more than 35 miles from the next nearest hospital, it has 25 beds or fewer and it has an average length of stay of four days or under.

He says the change in status won’t affect any services and should improve the hospital’s Medicare reimbursement rates.

The hospital has invested in a centralized, electronic medical records system, and t’s also invested in new technology.

It was the first u–p hospital to get a wide–bore MRI.

Community relations and development manager Lanna Scannell says an MRI procedure can provoke claustrophobia, and a wide-bore model greatly alleviates that concern because the bed on which the patient lies while being scanned is much larger.

About five years ago, hospital staff learned area patients were leaving in great numbers for obstetrics and gynecology.

But they’ve made changes since then.

Scannell says they’ve renovated the OB/GYN and nursery area, as well as hitting the recruiting trail.

She says they have a much larger staff of OB/GYNs now, and intrathecals for pain management are available to them as well to make it easier for pregnant women to participate with their physician in the birthing process without pain.

But that isn’t the only area in which the hospital excels that residents may not know about.

It has four sleep labs, and it has the U.P.’s only board-certified pediatric sleep specialist for performing studies on sleep issues affecting kids.

OSF Medical Group, to which the hospital belongs, is ranked among the top 100 integrated healthcare networks in the country.

And OSF has received that recognition for 14 straight years.