56 Pa. Commw. 535 | Pa. Commw. Ct. | 1981
Opinion by
St. John’s General Hospital (St. John’s) appeals here from an order of the Hearing and Appeals Unit of the Department of Public Welfare which denied the claims of St. John’s for reimbursement from the Department of Public Welfare (DPW) for costs which St. John’s alleges to have incurred pursuant to DPW’s inpatient hospital care program.
Between October of 1971 and January of 1972, St. John’s provided inpatient hospital care to 46 heroin addicts, all of whom were hospitalized for periods of from four to seven days each, and were treated with methadone to supplant their heroin addiction. The record indicates that the cost of the treatment was about $20,000.
Both St. John’s and the DPW submit that St. John’s right to reimbursement depends upon an interpretation of Section 9421.5 of DPW’s Medical Assistance Manual,
*537 An essential element in assuring high quality medical care is sound utilization of institutional facilities and professional services. Alternative, less costly arrangements would be utilized whenever hospital-type care is not essential to the well-being of the patient. (Emphasis in original.)
The hearing examiner concluded that inpatient hospital treatment was not essential for the methadone program and denied St. John’s claim for reimbursement.
Dr. Alexander Slavcoff, a DPW medical consultant, testified that St. John’s methadone program was not a detoxification program but a maintenance program. That is, heroin addicts were not detoxified, but their dependence on heroin was replaced by the use of methadone. He testified that such a transference could be achieved in an outpatient program because the methadone program does not subject the patient to serious symptoms of drug withdrawal which would require inpatient care. Serious withdrawal symptoms, he said, would occur only in a program which attempts to detoxify a patient completely by substituting for heroin progressively smaller quantities of methadone. Dr. Slavcoff also referred to a 1970 study conducted at methadone centers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which indicated that a methadone maintenance program such as St. John’s program could be carried out as effectively in an outpatient program as in an inpatient program.
Moreover, although the testimony of the St. John’s physician who helped to supervise the methadone pro
We believe that the hearing examiner’s finding that St. John’s inpatient methadone program was not essential to the well-being of the patients was based on substantial evidence and must therefore be affirmed.
Order
And, Now, this 10th day of February, 1981, the order of the Department of Public Welfare Hearing and Appeals Unit in the above-captioned case is affirmed.
Department of Public Welfare, Medical Assistance Manual, effective April 1, 1968.
The hearing examiner also based his decision on Section 9421.45 of the DPW Medical Assistance Manual.
This section prohibits reimbursement for inpatient care if the care is for “experimental, research or educational purposes.” Despite the overwhelming weight of evidence presented by St. John’s to the effect that its methadone program was a practical and