The Board of Trustees held its regular monthly meeting.

According to the financial statement, the Hospital had an overall net loss of $190,324 in January. The cash balance and equivalents rose by $16,051 during January.

For the first four months of the fiscal year, the Hospital has lost $2.12 million and eaten up $3 million in cash and cash equivalents.

Interim CEO Gary Marchand made remarks about the final switch from paper patient records to Electronic Medical Records. As of Monday, February 24, the physicians will be required to enter all patient notes and admission/discharge documentation into the EMR system. Mr. Marchand noted that some doctors will be unhappy about the change, since they are used to writing such notes in the patient charts or dictating them to the transcriptionists. Marchand stated that CMS and the Joint Commission require the medical record to be unified and all-electronic as of the end of the month.

[Editor's note: recent studies have reported that a switch to physician-entered records into a computerized record system results in decreases in doctor productivity in a range of 40-50%.]

The Board went into executive session and excluded the public and media for 48 minutes.