Greenwood and Leflore County officials are giving mixed reviews to the financial turnaround plan they heard from hospital administrators.
“I think we’re on the right track to move forward,” said Leflore County Supervisor Sam Abraham after emerging Tuesday from a closed-door session with the hospital board and top administrators that lasted an hour and 40 minutes. His sentiment was echoed by two members of the Greenwood City Council, Ronnie Stevenson and Lisa Cookston.
Robert Collins was part of a faction that wasn’t as convinced the plan would work.
“It should have been implemented a year ago,” said the District 5 supervisor. “You shouldn’t wait until the boat is going down and try to save it.”
Added District 4 Supervisor Eric Mitchell, “There wasn’t enough concrete evidence for me, to sit and say that this is what’s going to happen or this is our plan to make it happen. It was just a big assumption.”
The hospital is jointly owned by the city and county. Officials from the governmental entities asked for Tuesday’s meeting after reading about the continued financial woes of the hospital.
The hospital has been losing millions of dollars a year for several years, but those losses have been exacerbated by the pandemic now that nearly all of the $25 million in relief money it received from Congress has been exhausted.
For the first 11 months of the current budget year, the hospital has lost $13.2 million, even after using $11 million in federal grant money. For the same time period last year, the loss was just $755,000 when $15.5 million in coronavirus grant money was used.
As a result, the hospital’s cash reserves have dipped significantly.
The Greenwood hospital started the current budget year with $52.8 million of cash on hand. By the end of August, a month in which the hospital lost an additional $1.9 million, it had cash on hand of $28.3 million, a drop of more than 50%.
More than $14 million of its reserves are in the form of advanced Medicare payments that the hospital received in the early stages last year of the pandemic. That cushion, though, is a loan, which the hospital is paying back through deductions in its monthly reimbursements from the government insurance program. Those reimbursements are currently averaging about $500,000 a month, but they are scheduled to double next spring, according to Dawne Holmes, the hospital’s chief financial officer.
Hospital officials concur that the hospital’s current financial trajectory is untenable.
“We cannot continue at this rate, obviously,” said Holmes in response to questions posed by hospital board member Tracy Shelton before the meeting went into executive session. Shelton has been publicly voicing her concerns recently about the hospital’s sharply declining reserves and the fear that it will result in layoffs.
CEO Jason Studley told her that no layoffs or terminations are anticipated, although some positions might be eliminated through attrition.
In addition to the hospital board and administration, the closed session included four members of the county Board of Supervisors — Reginald Moore, Abraham, Mitchell and Collins — and four members of the City Council — Charles McCoy, Dorothy Glenn, Cookston and Stevenson.
Studley said afterward that he shared with them the latest quarterly update on the hospital’s operations, its three-to-five-year strategic plan and its immediate plan.
The immediate plan, to be phased in over the next 24 months, will be presented in a series of employee-only “town hall meetings” Thursday and Friday. Studley said he would be making the plan available to the Commonwealth next week but wanted to give the hospital’s roughly 1,000 employees the opportunity to hear it from him first.
“I really think it will help the employees’ morale, help get them fired up about the hospital and engaged in what it is that we’re doing and how we’re serving our community,” he said.
Moore, the president of the Board of Supervisors, who heard the plan, said it concentrates heavily on trying to improve patient revenues through adding lines of service and affiliating with other nearby hospitals.
Net patient revenues were down $11 million last year at the Greenwood hospital, and they are down an additional $3.1 million this year so far.
“Patient volume has to return up to pre-pandemic levels. That means a lot of our local residents need to start coming back to the hospital,” said Moore.
“Bottom line is we’ve got to get patients,” agreed Stevenson, the president of the City Council. “To get patients, we’ve got to recruit good doctors and to take care of our doctors.”
Studley said he hopes the elected officials took away from the meeting his request that they use their political connections at the state and federal levels to secure help for the hospital, whether it be through Medicaid expansion or additional grant money, such as the CARES funding the hospital previously received.
“Even though the CARES funds have run out, COVID has not,” said Studley.
He said, if anything, the financial ramifications of the pandemic are as severe now as ever. For most of August, the hospital was barred from doing any elective surgeries requiring an overnight stay under a statewide order from the Mississippi State Department of Health in response to the fourth wave of the coronavirus. Complicating matters is the loss of nurses, lab technicians and respiratory therapists who have been hired away as short-term contract employees by out-of-state hospitals at premium prices.
“They’re getting taken from us with these unreal contracts that we just can’t meet here at the hospital,” he said.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
