The recession hasn’t really hit us – yet. We expect that the new fiscal year, which started in July, to be more challenging than the last one, but that hasn’t been the case so far. We have actually performed better in the first two months of the new fiscal year than in the same period in the previous fiscal year.
But we still believe things could get worse and we have taken steps to preserve our budget, such as reducing hospital contributions to colleges in our system and postponing some construction. But there have been no layoffs or hiring freezes. State funding has been dropping, but we have been supplementing it with grant support, clinical revenues and philanthropy.
The recession has been milder here than in the rest of the country but it has still had an impact. The number of “self-pay” patients, those without health insurance, has grown from 4 percent to 6.5 percent in one year. However, admissions to the medical center increased by 4 percent in the last fiscal year, while all other hospitals in the area, except the children’s hospital, saw a decline. In fact, our market share has been steadily increasing in the past few years.
We’re looking forward to major donations. My biggest wish for next year is to get back to fundraising, which we postponed for the past six or seven months because of the recession. The University of Nebraska Medical Center, excluding the hospital, has raised more than $350 million in the 11 years I have been chancellor. Omaha, home of Warren Buffett, is one of the top three cities in terms of its combined number of billionaires and Fortune 500 companies per capita.
We recently received an eight-figure donation from a significant donor and we plan to publicly launch a new fundraising campaign on Oct 16. We are planning an eye institute, and a cancer campus with a new cancer research building and outpatient facility. We also are planning a center for drug discovery.
We’re anticipating a big year for research. We also want to do more research next year, using grants from the National Institutes of Health. There is a large amount of new NIH funding coming through the economic stimulus bill. Our proposed projects involve areas such as personalized medicine, in which you tailor the therapy to each patient’s genetic makeup, and regenerative medicine, using stem cells.
Learn more about Dr. Harold Mauer.
