Several changes are ahead for the Mississippi County Hospital System, according to Chief Operations Officer Chris Raymer's report to the system's Board of Governors at its Monday meeting.
Freedom Sleep Center is now open in Great River Medical Center, and will begin conducting sleep studies on patients on Nov. 21. This move involved the renovation and re-opening of the formerly unused sleep center on the GRMC campus.
The system and its physician practices are also preparing to switch over to a new system of medical coding. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) is used by the World Health Organization and has already been adopted by most countries, with the United States lagging behind because of its system of attaching medical coding to billing and insurance. The U.S. is now beginning to implement its use, Raymer said. The ICD-10 organizes and codes health information for statistics, epidemiology, health care management, research, prevention, primary care, etc., and will eventually replace the coding system currently used for patient records and billing.
System CEO Ralph Beaty said plans are moving forward with Dr. Roger Mason, who has committed to moving his full-time surgical practice to Blytheville. Mason plans to relocate to the county by the end of January 2014.
Beaty also addressed the issue of the system's continued drop in revenues since the summer.
"The loss at South Mississippi County is indicative of problems you see at other hospitals across the country," he said. "We're facing the perfect storm with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which is causing us to lose 18 percent of our Medicare reimbursement, plus continued recessionary times in the country. There are also Recovery Audit Contractors hired by Medicare to contest and ask for reimbursement on Medicare payouts that they review and deem unnecessary. We have $250,000 this year alone in requests from them. We appeal each one, but it's an expense that has to be maintained. Since this summer, the patient census on both campuses have been below what we historically see."
Tom McCall, representative for the hospital's management company, Quorum Health Resources, echoed that the loss of income and decrease in patient volume is a problem being seen across the country in hospitals.
"Patient volume is decreasing across the board," he said. "People are being kept in the hospital only long enough for observation but not long enough to be formally admitted. The health care industry agreed to a lot of take-aways [with the passing of the Affordable Care Act] in order to get more people insured, but people aren't getting insured yet, and we're not sure when they will."
At the end of October, the system had cash and net equivalents of $454,306. By the week of Nov. 8, it had accounts payable in the amount of $2,159,503. For the 10 months ending on Oct. 31, GRMC netted an income of $671,045, while SMC netted a loss of $2,275,134. With physician practices netting a loss of $465,881, the whole system ends the period with a loss of $2,069,970.
The next board meeting will take place at noon on Monday, Jan. 20 at Great River Medical Center.
sharris@blythevillecourier.com