Greenwood Leflore Hospital has ended its fiscal year on a fiscally sour note.
The hospital suffered a $1.9 million operating loss in September, bringing its losses for the year to $8.7 million.
Even when adding in the extra $491,000 in investment income the hospital generated over the past 12 months, it will still finish its fiscal year with an overall loss of almost $7.9 million. That was a million-dollar improvement from the year before, but it also means the hospital will finish with a substantial loss for the fourth straight year.
Cumulatively, the publicly owned hospital has lost about $45 million since 2015. Almost a third of that loss, however, resulted from a one-time accounting charge in 2017 of $14.5 million to deal with an accumulation of patient bills deemed uncollectable.
Getting revenues up continues to be the Greenwood hospital’s biggest challenge.
For the year, net patient revenues slipped almost $3.5 million, or 3.1%. Meanwhile, expenses were cut by about $4.4 million, or 3.6%.
Despite September’s poor performance, Chief Financial Officer Dawne Holmes told the hospital board Tuesday that she is optimistic the hospital’s finances will continue to improve. For example, she said, the hospital’s cash and cash equivalents were $24.3 million at the end of September, compared to just over $21 million at the end of January.
“We still have got a lot of work to do, but we are continuing to trend more in the right direction,” she said.
Tuesday’s meeting was the first with Gary Marchand sitting in as interim CEO.
The public portion of the meeting lasted less than 10 minutes. The board then went into executive session for about an hour to discuss a handful of items, including its employment agreement with Marchand. It was not immediately known Tuesday what, if any, action the board took.
•Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
