Chris Leeuw: Partners to offer needed services at former Five Seasons

For five years, the 108,000-square-foot Five Seasons Sports Club building sat abandoned on East 96th Street, beckoning a new tenant to put its sprawling fitness center, sports courts and swimming pools back to use.

Now, under the ownership of Conquer Paralysis Now, a not-for-profit founded by former IndyCar driver Sam Schmidt, and through a partnership with NeuroHope, an extended care physical therapy and fitness center for people living with paralysis, the building will be transformed with an altruistic purpose—to provide affordable, longer-term access to neuro rehabilitation outside the boundaries of the high-cost health care system.

According to the World Health Organization, one in four people will experience a neurologic injury—a spinal cord injury, brain injury or stroke—at some point in their life. Life-changing conditions like these take months or years of intensive rehabilitation to maximize recovery, but due to rising health care costs and limited insurance allowances, most people are discharged from hospitals in a matter of weeks.

Access to affordable health care must change. Solutions have been debated for years, but the cost of care continues to rise. A recent survey of 250 medical insurers found that health care costs are the highest in 15 years, with no signs of decline. As costs rise and are passed to insurers, coverage for resources such as physical, occupational and speech therapy, billed at more than $400 per hour, are slashed to protect bottom lines. It’s an unfortunate cycle that limits access to rehabilitative care for patients who need it most.

The average length of stay in acute rehabilitation for patients impacted by paralysis has decreased from 98 days in the 1970s to 16 days in 2022. When patients are discharged home, outpatient therapy is then limited to an average of just 28 visits per year. We face a sad irony: As research and therapeutic innovation advances, access to resources declines.

The conversation goes beyond rehabilitation. It’s equally important for people living with paralysis to have fitness and wellness programs for their long-term quality of life because 30% are readmitted to the hospital every year from complications related to inactivity.

To change the paradigm, unique organizations must be willing to dictate care based on need rather than insurance allowance. CPN and NeuroHope, also a not-for-profit, are partnering to accept the task.

Since 2015, NeuroHope has worked tirelessly to fill the void in care in central Indiana. With support from the University of Indianapolis, the Indiana Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Research Fund, the OrthoIndy Foundation and others, a multidisciplinary center has been created that has helped hundreds of patients. But the need for care has outgrown NeuroHope’s 13,000-square-foot space, and a waitlist for the services of its 20-member staff grows. CPN is experiencing the same need at its Driven NeuroRecovery Center that opened in Las Vegas five years ago.

With missions aligned, CPN and NeuroHope are now transforming the Five Seasons building into a state-of-the-art neurorecovery, adaptive sports and recreation center that will redefine access to rehabilitation by providing an affordable continuum of after-hospital care. It will feature physical, occupational and speech therapy, comprehensive wellness programming and a community of support for patients, families and caregivers that too often find themselves navigating the complex health care system alone.

Our community is blessed with world-class hospital systems that provide quality care in the immediate aftermath of neurologic injury. The redevelopment of the Five Seasons campus will ensure a standard of excellence exists for long-term care as well.•

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Leeuw is the founder and executive director of NeuroHope.