Thanking our outgoing CEO

As you probably know by now, we have a new CEO at the District, Mr. Corey Fedie. This

paper will be telling you about Corey, but I will say that he has made a great first impression with everyone, and is brimming over with the ideas and enthusiasm that made him the Board’s choice. We have not lost touch with our CEO of seven years, Gary Bostrom, who remains with the District in the capacity of Chief Financial Officer, working off-site (a common arrangement for smaller Districts).

This is, I feel, a good time to reflect on how much Gary accomplished for the District as CEO, and why he is so well liked by the whole District staff.

Gary inherited a District in dire financial condition. Over his seven years, he piloted it to stability through such hazards as a threatened shutdown of the District by CMS (the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) and the state for numerous long-standing Code violations; we escaped, barely, via the major upgrade funded by the bond that was passed under Gary’s guidance. The time pressure was drastic, and had Gary and the District not found and exploited a special provision in the law, you would today have no hospital (and no Emergency Room). The long re-construction process involved shutting down parts of the facility for months at a time, which correspondingly crippled our revenue stream, but he pulled us through.

Also, in an environment in which it is famously difficult for rural healthcare facilities to recruit providers, Gary brought on board Dr. Bryant and Dr. Anderson, plus PA-Cs Rose Jones (who had to leave us recently owing to family matters) and Julietta Shapiro, plus Nurse Practitioner Julie Trofibio, who is just starting in. All that is quite an accomplishment, indeed.

There was more, a lot more, that Gary got us through, and a full list would far exceed the space I have available. Let’s just say that we owe Gary a lot for keeping the ship upright when so many others like us are in deep trouble.

At the recent annual state Rural Hospital Leadership Conference, we heard how the state’s unfortunate “global budget” plan for funding rural healthcare facilities has been put on hold; that would seem to be good news (because such“global budgets” are a terrible idea for small facilities)–but it is not, because the reason for the hold is that CMS is cooking up its own plans for some sort of “global budget” approach. That is bad news. At least at the state level, we had and have a plausible chance to explain our issues to the legislature; but at the federal level, even with all the other similar facilities across the country chiming in, the ability to influence laws and administrative decisions is much less.

So for us, as Charles Dickens famously put it, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”