Editorial: Brooklyn needs hospital help -- stat

Brooklyn's struggling Interfaith Medical Center has asked a bankruptcy court for permission to remove the life supports and close its doors.

If the court says yes, thousands of understandably upset residents in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights will be left with diminished access to emergency care, kidney dialysis and other crucial services.

So what comes next?

For all the justified distress over Interfaith's imminent demise -- starkly intensified by the near-death status of Long Island College Hospital in Cobble Hill -- a few key business principles are in order first.

Whatever ultimately replaces Interfaith must be able to flourish as health care services enter a new age. The old model is changing fast. Hospitals that stubbornly rely on excessive emergency room visits, for example, will lose out. Those that merge with other institutions and offer a range of services including preventive care will survive.

This is exactly the course that a group empaneled by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2011 prescribed for Brooklyn.

The Cuomo panel urged several hospitals, Interfaith among them, to affiliate as quickly as possible with healthier institutions and then restructure. The result? Nothing. And by the time Interfaith filed for bankruptcy in late 2012, its debt had hit an unsustainable $130 million.

Now Interfaith's 250,000 patients a year are left high and dry in a borough with more than its share of chronic disease. It falls to Interfaith's staff to make sure their patients have quick referrals to other facilities in the borough. And it falls to the state Health Department -- and maybe the city's Health and Hospitals Corp. -- to come up with a lasting solution as other hospitals totter and fail.

Brooklyn's affluent residents typically use Manhattan hospitals, while health care gaps grow in neighborhoods where chronic disease is the worst. In Central Brooklyn -- where Interfaith is situated -- 23 percent of residents already lack access to primary care. New providers must be found and new networks must be built.

This crisis is only beginning.