PHMC Announces new Public Health Campus On Cedar

By Will Becker 

The Public Health Management Corporation (PHMC), recently announced new health services opportunities in the Cedar (West Philadelphia) community. The PHMC Public Health Campus on Cedar is founded on the guiding principle “to provide high-quality, community-informed, patient-centered health care and social services supporting the needs of the facility’s West and Southwest Philadelphia neighbors.”

This is especially needed in Southwest Philadelphia. A study in 2016 found that while Philadelphia as a whole is not lacking in a total number of primary care providers, the Southwest Philadelphia areas of Eastwick and Elmwood were found to have a significant disparity in access to resources than other neighborhoods in the city. As Suzanne Cohen, an administrator at the Health Federation of Philadelphia told the Inquirer "there is a lot of health care around here but it is not necessarily planned or implemented in ways that are most responsive to needs.” In a separate study conducted in 2018, eight census regions in Southwest Philadelphia were found to have primary-care access below city standards – or 1 physician per 3,500-11,856 residents vs. 1 physician per 1,243 residents. 

The opening of this new center is a part of PHMC’s partnership with the Greater Philadelphia region’s premier health care organizations: Penn Medicine, Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and the Independence Blue Cross Foundation. This coalition’s goals for the new public health campus focuses on this aforementioned health inequity and aims to provide the community with access to primary and behavioral health care, emergency services, acute care services, substance use treatment, and other social support services.

With this transition, PHMC is the owner and operator of the property, with plans over time to include PHMC programming on the campus. At the moment, Penn Medicine is managing the hospital emergency department, inpatient services, and hospital-based behavioral health programming as a remote location for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Learn more about this exciting advancement for the Philadelphia community by watching their announcement video here.