SNOW SHOE — The residents in the Snow Shoe community will soon have no option but to travel out of the area to receive medical care as the Mountaintop Area Medical Center plans to close by the end of August.
The clinic, located at 402 E. Sycamore Road, Snow Shoe Township, is managed by Keystone Rural Health and provides primary care services, lab services, family planning, women’s health, well child visits and immunization, among other services. With no medical center in the area, residents will have to travel to Philipsburg, Bellefonte, State College or even further for their medical care needs.
Keystone Rural Health CEO Kristie Bennardi said there were several factors that lead to the “very difficult decision” to close the medical center, but it was necessary for the sustainability of the company as a whole.
Over the past few years, she said, the number of patients seen at the facility has been plummeting, and that number fell even further over the course of the pandemic.
“We have seen a decline in patients over the past two to three years with people choosing to go to some of the bigger health systems in the area. We had a large decline in patient visits during COVID as well,” Bennardi said.
She added that the closure of the Moshannon Valley Pharmacy location in the building last July also impacted the center because it lost revenue from the government program that allowed centers to help pay for medication of under-insured and low-income patients.
“Once Moshannon Valley Pharmacy moved out of the building last July, we saw an even greater impact on that facility from the loss of 340b revenue,” Bennardi said.
Over the past year, the center has seen fewer than 500 patients, with only 173 coming from the Snow Shoe ZIP code. She said Keystone Rural will help those remaining patients transition through the end of December by providing case mangers to help them find new primary care providers.
The center had three employees, but over the past couple of months two quit in anticipation of the closure, Bennardi said.
“We have been sending staff from our other locations to cover the need. They travel 1 to 1.5 hours daily to get there,” said Bennardi. “The nurse practitioner at this office will transition to our Emporium office, but will continue to provide telehealth visits to those that wish to continue seeing her as long as we are allowed to continue to provide and bill for this service. Rep. Glenn Thompson introduced a bill called the Health Act to propose the continued ability of FQHCs like ours to provide for and bill for telehealth services permanently. She also will continue to provide home visits to those patients that are homebound, as we have always done.”
Those who wish to stay in the health system and are not homebound will be transferred to Keystone Rural’s Cameron County Health Centre in Emporium, which is 54 miles away.
Snow Shoe Township supervisors told The Centre County Gazette that they were not given a heads up about the closing, and only heard about it after a letter was mailed to area residents a week ago.
They said the news is “terrible,” and the closing is going to be a loss for the community that has been hit hard recently by other closings.
The supervisors plan to contact the county to see how it might be able to assist the community as they grapple with this closure.
This all comes to an area that has been impacted over the past couple of years by the closures of business that are essential.
In February 2020, Hall’s Market was hit by a devastating fire. Business owners decided not to rebuild and reopen, leaving the area without a full-service grocer. The closing of Moshannon Valley Pharmacy’s Snow Shoe location was yet another loss.
The Medical Center has been in operation since 1972. Keystone Rural took over operation in 2003.
This story appears in the July 29-Aug. 4 edition of The Centre County Gazette
