PAM Health quickly fills Greeley beds

GREELEY — Maybe this is true of all post-acute rehabilitation, but PAM Health isn’t likely to be found sitting on its hands.

Two months after opening its doors, PAM Rehabilitation Hospital in Greeley had filled half of its 42 beds, while quickly expanding its services. Nationally, PAM, which used to stand for Post Acute Medical, continues to expand at an remarkable rate for a privately held LLC, based in Enola, Pennsylvania.

“This all happened fairly fast,” said Blake Sims, CEO of the Greeley facility, “It was a great location: We can reach most of Northern Colorado into Wyoming. There are also two great hospital centers.”

For those not quite in the know, post-acute hospitals specialize in serving patients who no longer need to be in an acute-care hospital but are not far enough in recovery to go home. So the main focus of this hospital is getting patients into the long- and short-term therapy they need to recover.

“It’s like a regular hospital … but remove the emergency rooms and the ORs (operating rooms), the imaging systems,” Sims said. “We do have pharmaceutical, the nursing stations, the meeting rooms; it looks like a hospital, smells like a hospital, …”

And, of course, it is a hospital, just not the first one for most patients. PAM often partners with existing hospital systems where it operates only rehab units.

PAM Health operates physical rehabilitation, specialty and behavioral hospitals, and combinations of them. The company puts its 2023 annual revenue at more than $1.2 billion.

“After the  newest hospitals open this year, we will be at 72 hospitals in 17 states,” said Lisa MacLean, the chief strategy and government relations officer for PAM.

In Colorado, PAM entered the market in 2019, with PAM Specialty Hospital of Denver, which it acquired with eight other long-term acute care hospitals from LifeCare Holdings in Texas, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Louisiana and Ohio. PAM Health Rehabilitation Hospital of Westminster — a 63-bed hospital providing high acuity care for patients in medical, nursing, respiratory and therapy service — was acquired from Curahealth and Nautic Partners LLC in 2021, along with 15 specialty, rehab and hospitals in Arizona, Texas, Indiana, Florida, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania.

PAM is also building another center in Golden, which will soon open along with several new facilities in Florida, MacLean said. The company will also be working in the behavioral health field in Texas, she said, and a great deal of its holdings are in Texas and Florida.

“It’s very planned growth,” MacLean said. “When we look at the market, … there is a huge need here (in Northern Colorado). We see a pocket that needs our services.”

Those services are, in themselves, an acknowledged needed service, as about 99% of the revenues coming into PAM of Greeley will come directly from medical insurance, Sims said. And here, the company is expanding services to help additional clients, such as offering bedside dialysis.

“That saves the patients time” and the need for transportation, Sims said. “So they can focus on their therapy.”

The Greeley hospital treats a long list of conditions, though heart and stroke conditions, neurologic and orthopedic situations immediately come to mind.

“The key is offering three hours of therapy, … and daily physician rounding,” Sims said. “It could be a variety of conditions.”

PAM of Greeley is working on, and perhaps now already offering, out-patient therapy. Though that accounts for a fraction of the company’s total revenue, perhaps less than 3%, Greeley will offer separate admissions, examination and therapy rooms and even gyms to separate in-house from outside patients.

But all require the same care from staff, Sims emphasized.

“What I tell employees (at orientation) is, ‘if a patient is here in the hospital, something happened to land them here.’”

“For us it can be another Monday, but it’s not just another Monday for every patient. Make sure you recognize it’s not just another Monday.”

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