Paul Szmal: Good morning, it's 8.37, it's FLX Morning Tuesday, brought to you by Enstac Automotive and Trailer, your go-to destination for hauling and vehicle services, 2567 Edwards Road, Waterloo, or online at enstacautomotive.com. It's time to get healthy with UR Medicine, Finger Lakes Health, Kimberly Alacua is here. Good morning.
Kimberly Ilacqua: Morning, Ted. Happy New Year.
Paul Szmal: Happy New Year to you. Now, our provider is coming up from Pinyan, and the roads are a little slick in places, so hopefully he'll be along in a little bit, but we have some news and notes that we can talk about until he gets here, starting with a kidney dialysis event that you have coming up.
Kimberly Ilacqua: Yes, this Saturday at the Sons of Italy in Geneva, we have Rock for Kidneys. It's from 4 to 8 p.m. at the Sons of Italy on Prospect Ave, and it's going to be a ziti dinner, $10 a person, there's also going to be two bands that are going to be playing, and there's going to be some drawings, and it's just going to be a lot of fun, so all money that's raised is going to be donated to the Geneva General Dialysis Center.
Paul Szmal: Wow. Is there any particular plan? Are they doing any sort of upgrades or anything, or just general funding for that program?
Kimberly Ilacqua: It's just general funding. It's a family member of a patient who is sponsoring this, and he's very grateful that we have the dialysis center in Geneva so that they didn't have to continue to drive outside the region.
Paul Szmal: Oh, that's great. So it's just another example of how important it is for us to have access to care locally.
Kimberly Ilacqua: Well, it's also, it's interesting because when we talk about the foundation and fundraising care, how many times patients or families step up and make donations because they want to say thank you for that care they received.
Paul Szmal: Absolutely, and last year we were very grateful for all the support that we received for Soldiers and Sailors as we were fundraising for the digital x-ray room through all the centennial events, and also we did a lot of fundraising for Geneva General for our new CT, and then this year we are going to be fundraising for a new x-ray room at Geneva General Hospital, so we have a lot of things that we're working on.
Kimberly Ilacqua: Now, do you have a number yet from the holiday, the lights and the trees?
Paul Szmal: That I do not. I should have that at the end of the month, but we thank you to everyone who supported those three projects because we really appreciate it.
Kimberly Ilacqua: We'll do that a little bit later on. What we're going to talk about today when our program gets here is what's called the swing bed program at Soldiers and Sailors Hospital where you need a level of care kind of between full continuing hospital care, but you're not quite ready to be discharged, so we can talk about that in a little bit, but one of the things, you get to this time of year and sometimes people are looking for a new provider or want to change things up a little bit. How can UR Medicine Finger Lakes Health help in that process?
Paul Szmal: Well, we are very proud that we have a lot of primary care health providers in our network, and we also have specialty care. As Finger Lakes Health, we're the only local health care system in the community, so for primary care, we have in Geneva, we have Geneva General Primary, excuse me, Geneva General Primary Care. We have Dr. Mungeri and Dr. Christensen. We also have Ashley Pike and Jen Bell who are accepting new patients, and then we have in Waterloo, we have Seneca Family Health Center, and Seneca Falls, we have Life Care Medical Associates, and Pen Yen, we have Soldiers and Sailors Health Center, Dundee, we have Dundee Family Health Center, and we also have Clifton Springs Internal Medicine, so all of our practices are accepting new patients, and you can call 315-787-4060. That's our physician referral line, and we can get you connected with a new primary care provider.
Kimberly Ilacqua: And we're also excited, as we talked about last year, that we have neurosurgery now at Geneva General with Dr. Lucas Oreck, and then we also have Dr. Alexander Okoto, who is a new spine surgeon. He was on the radio show last year as well, and Dr. Mackenzie Neumeier, who is a joint surgeon that's with us at Interlakes Orthopedic Surgery, and he specializes in the anterior hip approach, so it's less invasive for hip replacement.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, that's really a great advance. So we have a lot more exciting things that are going to be coming at Finger Lakes Health for 2025.
Kimberly Ilacqua: And also we were, I don't know if it was last visit or a couple of visits ago, you were talking about how you're beginning to bring together a lot of electronic records into one place so that patients have better access to their records. Remind us about that.
Paul Szmal: Yes. Starting, it was in the middle of December that patients were able to now see their lab and some of their clinical reports in MyChart, which is a patient portal through Epic. And with that, we're very excited because this is one of the benefits of our affiliation with the University of Rochester Medical Center, is being able to have this one record, one record, one patient account for our patients to go into one portal to be able to see everything. Because right now it's very confusing for patients to have to use multiple portals. So by November 2026, everything should be in place and it just takes some time to get all the different aspects merged together. But right now patients are able to see lab results and some of their clinical reports in MyChart for services they have done at Finger Lakes Health.
Kimberly Ilacqua: So how long has the collaboration with UR Medicine been in place now?
Paul Szmal: The official affiliation was in 23, August 1st of 2023. So like a year and a half, roughly.
Kimberly Ilacqua: Yeah. And then we started our management service agreement with them. I believe that was in 2020, right at the beginning of COVID. I mean, I think this has to be looked at as a positive for all of you who work there and for the patients because you've got those resources of UR Medicine, but Finger Lakes Health has remained relatively independent, provides all those services that you just talked about. I mean, a real win-win.
Paul Szmal: Absolutely. We're very, very fortunate to be an affiliate of the University of Rochester Medical Center. They help us with recruitment, like I just mentioned, bringing some new orthopedic surgeons, bringing neurosurgery, some new services to the region. We have some more that will be coming in 2025. They help us with grant writing for large federal and state grants. They help us with cost efficiencies, trying to find better pricing for products that we have to purchase and a lot of just guidance on things that we're working on. So it's been very beneficial to us and it's very beneficial to our patients because as we begin to bring more and more services locally, it just allows patients not to have to travel. And the more that we can keep care local here in our communities, the more it helps for when we need to transfer our patients up to Rochester to be able to have the beds for that. So it's very important for people to have their care local. And then when we do need to have transfers up to, like we'll say, to Strong, then there are beds that are open because those beds should be used for people that need a higher level of care and then people that we can provide the care for here to be able to do it locally.
Kimberly Ilacqua: It's 846 now, I feel like, this morning. We're talking with Kimberly Alaco with UR Medicine, Finger Lakes Health, and again, our providers on the way up from Penny Inn. If we don't get a chance to talk to them about the Swing Bed Program, we're going to record that after 9 o'clock and then we'll play back the whole conversation for you tomorrow. So what are some of the other things in the works in 2025?
Paul Szmal: Something very exciting that's happening. Starting on February 3rd, we will have Urgent Care at Penny Inn. So this is something the community has asked for and we are very excited to be able to deliver this. It will be located in the Office of Soldiers and Sailors Health Center, so that will be opening on February 3rd. There will be online scheduling, the same services that we offer at our Geneva and our Seneca Falls Urgent Care locations, so we're very, very excited about that.
We'll be working on a new issue of Thrive that will be coming out this spring that will have some information on some new providers and new services that we'll be offering. We also hope that everyone receives Thrive in the mail.
Kimberly Ilacqua: Yeah, is that quarterly?
Paul Szmal: It's twice a year.
Kimberly Ilacqua: Okay, twice a year. And how do you get it if you're not getting it?
Paul Szmal: It's available on our website, so there's a digital version on FLHealth.org or you could also call our office at 315-787-4053 and we can send a copy out in the mail to you. It's a very useful tool that we have a provider directory insert that lists all of our providers that accept new patients, so it includes our primary care providers, it has our general surgery practice, our dermatology, cardiology, and orthopedics, podiatry, urgent care, also includes rehab, our lab draw stations, so it has a lot of information for the services that we offer.
Kimberly Ilacqua: All right, we'll look forward to that. I'll tell you what we'll do, because I know that this is not your favorite thing to talk and talk and talk, and I'm very proud because when you first started doing this, we'd get maybe 15 seconds and you'd go, can I go sit down please? So very well done, Kim, thanks so much.
