Hospital District Happenings

There is no single over-arching theme today, but rather a collection of bits and pieces of news, mostly good.

First: the state Healthcare Authority did an audit of our Electronic Health Records payments, and found that they still owe us some $308,856.18. We don’t yet know exactly when and how we are to receive that money, but it should be fairly soon now that they have the data.

When healthcare facilities were essentially required to move to Electronic Health Records, we were given financial incentives that amounted to nearly full coverage of our costs, provided we met specified “meaningful use” criteria.

The money in question represents an underpayment by the state of the full amount due us for our costs and our documented “meaningful use”.

Next: the Grand Columbia Health Alliance, a five-District inter-local association (of which we are a founding member), has received a three-year grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration.

The grant is for $597,900 ($199,625 a year), and is “to provide coaching and support to the primary-care practices that will manage and support...patients age 30-74 at risk of developing cardiovascular disease.”

Also: the County is making its Community Health Needs Assessment, and you can participate by taking a short, simple online survey at https://www.snapsurveys.com/wh/s.asp?k=152527155985. The more data the County can collect, the better they, and thus we, can serve your healthcare needs.

One piece of not-so-great news: the Ritzville facility roof continues to have leak problems.

The contractor has told us that they may well have to just replace that entire section of the roof. They have so far been very good about trying to deal with this issue (plus we have not yet approved release of their final payment), so we have high hopes that the matter will soon be fixed once and for all.

Further, we have finally taken the step of joining an Accountable-Care Organization.

The management service, Caravan Healthcare, has estimated that we could improve our net income by $95,630 over the three-year contract (which starts with 2019), or about $31,877 a year.

That could well be somewhat over-optimistic, only time will tell, but we have everything to gain and nothing to lose by going forward.

Moreover, it is fairly clear, as clear as anything can be in this period of rapid changes in the healthcare environment, that it is wise to join up now, because it appears very likely that soon there will be a stick instead of a carrot for joining an ACO (possibly even a mandatory requirement), so those who enroll early will be better off than the latecomers.

Finally, it now appears, based on some recent conference calls, that the federal government will, after all, provide the matching funds for the state’s grant to the 13-District Washington Rural Hospital Access Preservation Group, of which we are a member.

Those matching funds had been built into the estimates the state relied on, but then some bureaucratic fiddles cast the federal part into doubt; it now appears that all will be well after all.