At the Cook County North Shore Hospital board of directors meeting on March 20, 2014, business manager Vera Schuman reported that the hospital experienced a loss of $239,030 for the month of February, a budget shortfall of $203,026.
While February was bad, January wasn’t much better.
In January the hospital was $154,185 under budget. But throwing in non-operating income and the tax levy, the net loss ended up being $78,965.
Schuman gave a breakdown of February’s losses: Hospital patient revenues were 15.4 percent under budget while the Care Center revenues were 1.6 percent above budget.
Projected acute patient days were down 50.9 percent, swing bed patient days were off 43.9 percent and the Care Center resident days were 10.4 percent lower than predicted while emergency room visits were also down 30.3 percent from projections.
Only outpatient ancillary visits were up, but only by 2.4 percent.
“Our volumes were down everywhere,” said Hospital/Care Center Director Kimber Wraalstad.
For the month of February the hospital and care center generated a net loss of $168,733, or $202,101 less than the projected budget.
In other news Wraalstad told the board that Cook County Public Health will pay the hospital/care center up to $40,000 to purchase home health care services for clients who are receiving care on a sliding fee basis under a 2014 Purchase of Service Contract. This is about $700 higher than last year, Wralstad said.
While the rest of the world has long shifted away from ICO9 to ICO10 coding systems used to gather data that can be shared worldwide in an effort to further research and establish an international classification of diseases, most of the U.S. is still using ICO9. However, the state has mandated a switch to the newer classification beginning October 10, 2014.
“It’s going to be a disaster,” said St. Luke’s CEO John Strange, who was speaking to the board from Duluth via telephone.
“They (the state) haven’t even brought in a vendor yet,” Strange said, conjuring up images of the MNsure rollout.
Wraalstad held up a picture of a baby elephant and a picture of a daddy elephant. “The daddy elephant is what ICO10 is going to look like in comparison to the baby elephant, which represents ICO9,” she said to the board.
Currently there are about 10,000 medical codes tied to ICO9, but Strange said there would be 140,000 codes in the ICO10 plan.
“We were supposed to institute this last year, but it was delayed,” Wraalstad said, adding that the U.S. has used the ICO9 program since the 1970s, “because it is tied to insurance payments in the U.S. Our Medicaid payments come from this. If they don’t get it up and running we won’t get paid.”
Wraalstad said the hospital/care center receives less than 10 percent of its revenue from these payments, while bigger facilities like St. Luke’s receives a far bigger percentage of payments because of the wide range of illnesses and diseases that are treated there.
“This conversion is going to be hard for us, but it is going to be a nightmare for bigger hospitals,” Wraalstad said.
Once again the hospital auxiliary has donated funds to continue the hospital and care center’s Health & Wellness Committee’s onsite garden project, said Wraalstad, adding a big thank you to that group for their ongoing support.
On February 27 auditors from McGladrey & Pullen completed their onsite fieldwork and found only one small correction in procedure. The final audit will be completed and submitted by the April board meeting. Wraalstad said that Kelly Swearingen did a great job for the hospital.
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