(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2023)
(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2023)
(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2023)
Dr. John Rugge, the founder and CEO of the Hudson Headwaters Health Network, took home the prestigious J. Walter Juckett Award for Community Service on Friday March 10. The award is the 34th given annually by the Adirondack Regional Chamber of Commerce to an “honoree, who demonstrates a fierce commitment and hands-on dedication to the betterment of our local community," according to the ARCC website.
Dr. Kristin Mack, medical lead of HHHN’s Ticonderoga and Moriah Health centers introduced Rugge during the ceremony first by explaining that networks not only connect one point to another, they grow and change, offering support and structure within a system.
North Country healthcare needed it.
“He started phrases with ‘The community had had a doctor, but they were leaving’,” she said, highlighting a major issue in North Country healthcare.
Chestertown and Warrensburg lost four old-style, country doctors in just two or three years in the early 1970s, leaving the communities without any doctor at all by 1974.
In the face of that, “Rugge built and made a sustainable system, a network, so that no one problem could take away a community’s access to healthcare,” Mack said.
It almost failed before it really got started, Rugge said, when he took his turn at the microphone.
He had a letter in his desk drawer back then saying the Chestertown health center would shut down just a couple years after starting. It had been a satellite emergency center of the Glens Falls Hospital in 1974.
At the point that the letter was written, Rugge and Glens Falls Hospital had about a half dozen centers open in North Country. First was Chestertown and then Warrensburg. They operated on the same business model: the towns owned the property and maintained it while the hospital provided staff and operations.
It was a failed model, and the centers lost money from the start, so they expanded in an attempt to take advantage of margins of scale.
“Next came centers in North Creek and Indian Lake using the same model only to have that shortfall that deficit grow bigger and bigger and bigger and become unsustainable," he said.
A fortuitous phone call came from a woman who used to write grants when she lived in Kentucky.
According to Rugge, she asked, “Wouldn’t I know about the Community Health Center program?”
He had not.
He learned it was a fledgling federal program aimed at the indigent and the uninsured.
Winning that grant that ultimately saved healthcare inside the Adirondack Park, Rugge said.
To win it, however, they had to hit two marks: promise to care for everyone, the insured and uninsured alike. That was easy, they were already doing that.
They also had to create a stand-alone nonprofit company and separate themselves from the hospital. Without the grant, they would go bankrupt, Rugge said, so they talked to local politicians and business leaders including Jack Toney, owner of Jacobs and Toney the Meat Store of the North, who became head of new company’s board.
They won the grant, and others, and survived. He attributed the success to the merger of government and business to bring about change.
Since then HHHN has grown to 21 health centers and 150,000 patients from northern Saratoga County to the border.
“Canada, not Mexico,” Rugge quipped.
A host of North Country leadership praised Rugge at the event.
“The challenges nationwide in healthcare are very significant, but even more so in the rural parts of the country, like the Adirondacks and the North Country,” New York State Senator Dan Stec said. “Your model…and your tireless efforts over decades has really made a difference in the lives of thousands of people in New York.”
Town of Salem Supervisor Sue Clary added, “He knows what accessibility to all means; it means a healthy family; it means everybody has the ability to get healthcare, you don’t have to wait a week. You can do it when you need it.”
Queensbury Supervisor John Strough, a former history teacher at Queensbury High School, said: “I know my local history, and there’s few people that I know of as outstanding in what they’ve contributed to our greater community than Dr. John Rugge."
Kevin Geragthy, the chair of the Warrren County Board of Supervisors reported that the board approved a proclamation for him. Stec said that the state legislature approved a resolution marking his achievements.