Tuesday, November 15, 2022, 3:58 pm News Flash Archive

The Greenwood Leflore Hospital Board of Trustees held its regular monthly meeting today.

According to the financial report given by Mrs. Dawne Holmes, the Hospital had an overall loss of $1.94 million in October. Operating expenses were $7.00 million, while operating revenue was $5.01 million.

At the end of October, the cash and equivalents were $5.34 million. The net cash burn for October was $1.26 million. Of the $5.34 million of cash left, $3.5 million cannot be touched legally because it is in trust to cover the malpractice insurance and as security on the cooling tower financing note. That would mean that in reality, at the end of October, there was only $1.84 million in cash left to spend.

Mrs. Holmes reported that CMS has granted the deferred payment plan, which stretches out the Medicare Loan Repayment to 60 months, at 4% interest. The monthly payments will be approximately $102,000.

In October, the hospital made approximately $100,000 in payments to Medicare for the repayment of the short term loan. The hospital still owes Medicare $5.51 million.

Mrs. Holmes related the problems that have occurred since Medicaid changed its claim/payment processor to Gainwell. Providers all over the state are not being paid for their services, especially Medicare crossover claims. This has negatively impacted the hospital as well.

Mrs. Holmes reported that Medicaid has announced that it will advance the December and January Medicaid payments into November 2022. That means that the payments expected in December and January will be paid in November. There will therefore be no payments in December and January.

The chiller has been broken for several months, and the net cost of repair, less insurance settlement, will be around $117,000.

Mrs. Holmes stressed that two capital investments, replacing a large section of roof, and installation of a new Electronic Health Records system, will have to be faced in the upcoming year. The EHR system from Cerner (recently bought up by database and operating system giant Oracle) will cost $27 million over a ten year period, with $8 million of that being the capital investment (which Cerner will finance over ten years), and the remaining being annual support. The current system by Soarian is no longer being updated and will not be supported in the future. Upgrades to the EHR system have to be made to stay in compliance with CMS and to enable proper claims submission as well as quality care data. The current support payments will of course be discontinued once Soarian is replaced, so the net cost will be less than $27 million over the ten years.

The board then went into executive session, with the public and the press excluded for 62 minutes.

The Board of Trustees meeting may be viewed here: GLH Board Meeting, November 15, 2022

To review our reporting on GLH and its financial woes, please see here: Index of Greenwood Leflore Hospital news articles

John Pittman Hey
The Taxpayers Channel

News Flash Archive