1. Financial strength. We don’t want to make too much money, but if we set our margins too low we could not be around for the community.
2. Reinvestment back into the facility. In the past three years, we have replaced our women’s health center and have opened a new $6 million cancer center. Cancer care is not attractive financially, but it is good for the community. Before the cancer center opened, people had to travel one and half hours away to get cancer care.
3. Hospital cost structure. We try to manage our costs and do what seems appropriate for the community. We are careful about adding to costs, especially new staff positions. We know we’d have to recoup that expense through the charges we make. We do grow, but we want to provide the appropriate level of prices.
We have also improved efficiency. The organization has worked on improving contracts for buying supplies. We have secured better prices from vendors. We perform monthly reviews to make sure each department is staying within budget. We look at the outliers and try to understand any variances.
4. Hospital charge structure. We try to keep our rates as low as we can because patients in this community will be paying those charges. Out cost structure is lower than similar hospitals in the state, which is saying a lot because Utah hospitals have some of the lowest costs in the nation.
5. Quality of care performance. We have done well in the CMS Core Measures program and with patient satisfaction scores in the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems program. We monitor HCAHPS results monthly and contact areas that are not doing well. Our nursing managers visit every patient each day and ask them how things are going.
Contact Alan Robinson at alan.robinson@imail.org.
