Local hospital ekes a profit

Coulee Medical Center managed to show a slim profit in January, following months of losses, mostly due to downward adjustments in the amounts due from Medicaid in 2014.

CMC’s financial statements for January showed a $1,351 gain on the bottom line.

“I’m the happiest person in the world to say that,” Chief Executive Officer Debbie Bigelow told the hospital district’s commissioners Monday night.

The hospital and clinics recorded net operating revenue of nearly $1.9 million in January. Expenses of just over that amount left the bottom line with a $37,000 loss before adding in revenue from investments and other non-operating gains.

Small as it was, the gain was far better than the $2.5 million loss posted in December. The hospital struggled through much of 2014 as the state Medicaid bureau adjusted downward the amounts it said it should have paid in earlier years. Many months were hit with those adjustments totaling many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

December’s big loss was an attempt not to carry such losses forward into the new year.

Bigelow said the January gain came in a month that is normally a loser for CMC. The budget had predicted a $2,100 loss.

But January averaged 19 beds filled a day, and that average is headed up, following the hiring of two new doctors, who work opposite each other in alternating two-week shifts.

Doctors Andre Nye and Sharron Servin-Obert are both family practice doctors who have covered the emergency room on a fill-in basis, but have not signed on with the hospital, part of the plan to ease the patient backload at the facility.

Chief of Staff Dr. Andrew Castrodale said the clinic is currently seeing about 70 patients a day.

Another physician is scheduled to begin practice in August and a second surgeon and an endocrinologist will also join CMC that month.

Bridging the seven months until then will be a challenge, Bigelow said.