Greenwood Leflore Hospital lost almost $10 million in revenue during the final seven months of its budget year due to COVID-19, according to its auditor’s calculation.
Nevertheless, the hospital’s bottom line showed a significant improvement over the previous two years, thanks in part to large amounts of government assistance it received to help it cope with the pandemic.
For the year ending Sept. 30, the publicly owned hospital posted a net loss of $2.5 million. That was the smallest loss the hospital has suffered in several years. In 2019, the red ink totaled almost $6.4 million; the year before that, it was almost $8.9 million.
“As you can see, we’re headed in the right direction. We’re turning that ship around,” John Calvert of the Horne accounting firm told the hospital board Tuesday as he and two colleagues presented the annual financial audit.
“Dawne and her team have done a really good job doing that,” he said, referring to the hospital’s chief financial officer, Dawne Holmes.
Although the hospital’s operations were shored up substantially this past year by using almost $13.6 million in coronavirus relief money from the government, Holmes said that it wasn’t only the grant money that improved the financial performance.
Several turnaround measures, including the closure of three unprofitable clinics and the initiation of a contract pharmacy program that has reduced the hospital’s cost of pharmaceuticals, have contributed as well, she said. So has a higher rate of collections.
“It’s multiple things that we’ve done,” Holmes said.
Hank Hargrove, left, a member of the Greenwood Leflore Hospital Board, and Dr. Roderick Givens, the physician liaison to the board, listen to a presentation during the board’s monthly meeting Tuesday.
She noted that even after netting out all the COVID-related funding, the hospital still has increased its cash on hand by $2 million since the end of September 2019.
In all, the Greenwood hospital has received $24.8 million in coronavirus relief money, most of it from the federal government. The funds are intended to help hospitals offset the additional costs of treating COVID-19 patients and the decline in revenue from the mandated suspension of some elective procedures and the reluctance of a virus-worried public to seek non-emergency care.
Of the $11.2 million of relief money it carried over into the current fiscal year, the Greenwood hospital has used $4.8 million through December, leaving $6.4 million to apply against future losses before June 30.
It also has a separate cushion of $16.5 million from another federal program that allowed the hospital last year to draw Medicare reimbursements in advance. That second pot of money, though, is a loan that the hospital will have to start repaying later this year, unless Congress changes the terms.
For the month of December, the hospital posted a net profit of $186,000 after using $2.7 million of coronavirus relief money. That compares to a loss of $256,000 in December 2019.
For the first three months of the fiscal year, the hospital’s net loss, helped by the nearly $5 million in coronavirus relief money, was $367,000. That compares to a loss of $1.9 million for the same period a year ago.
Even when the pandemic passes, the hospital could be faced with a new financial challenge, according to Laura Gillenwater, a senior manager with Horne. She told the hospital board to prepare for a potential surge in uninsured patients with chronic health problems.
“If folks don’t get their jobs back afterward, you are going to have uninsured folks coming in for health care, and unfortunately some of those folks may have delayed care because of that consumer anxiety (over COVID-19). They’re going to come in having less or no insurance and be potentially sicker.”
That could be a tough pill to swallow for the hospital, which saw its amount of charity care more than double this past year to nearly $8.3 million.
•Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
