what is "money losers" of a community hospital?

Published

We are a 220 bed community hospital with a very high percentage of the patient population being medicare and medicaid. We were just officially informed that our hospital is 1.7 million in debt and 7 million short for next year. We were told that everything is on the table and the hospital could get much smaller.

I am sure the layoff and closing of community hospitals are norm around this country with the cut back of medicare medicaid spending. Just wondering what units are considered "money losers" of a community hospital? is it safe to say that the older the patient population is, the less money the unit will make? thanks.

Specializes in Critical Care.
by "skilled care beds", do you mean long term care / nursing home/ rehab that is attached to the hospital? As I understand, this type of units rely greatly on Medicare/Medicaid too. When the reimbursement diminishes, these units are struggling to survive too.

There's plenty of money to be had in "skilled Nursing care" despite the fact that medicare is the predominant payer in this market. Kindred profited $81 million last year, primarily off of medicare and medicaid patients, and that's after paying their C-suite ridiculous amounts of money, their CEO made $6.4 million in 2011.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in PDN; Burn; Phone triage.

I work on burn and it's a huge money sink. The majority of our patients have no insurance and even smaller burns might require multiple surgeries and a prolonged hospital stay.

Up Vote Up Vote ×
Specializes in Critical Care, Education.

If this discussion is intended to focus on changes that could improve a community hospital's bottom line, you need to think beyond patient care reimbursement & look at eliminating waste and duplication of services. There are some 'easy' was to do that such as

* equipment breakage due to carelessness... such as repairs to scopes; even the smallest scope repair can wipe out several days worth of endoscopy revenues

* capturing all eligible charges - this is going to become much more crucial with the switch to ICD-10

* decreasing turnover - this is expensive! Costs associated with finding a new nurse, training the new nurse, using agency/contract or overtime to fill in. Plus - experienced staff are more efficient

* doing it right the first time - lab do-overs due to mislabeling, unusable specimens, etc. are a waste of money

* preventing readmissions within 30 days by improving the quality of discharge planning (they are not reimbursed)

* eliminating weekend hold-overs because essential services/procedures that have to be done are not available until Monday...

There are a jillion ways to decrease costs & the average nurse knows most of them. But it is very rare for a CEO to ask for our insight so they tend to take the 'easy' route by eliminating positions.

Just sayin'

Up Vote Up Vote ×
+ Join the Discussion