Health Care Trends

Many of the health care trends that will affect me are easy for me to identify currently because we are building a new facility. The thought of moving to a brand new facility with state-of-the-art equipment and space is so exciting! Part of this transition is our move to electronic medical documentation and charting. Currently, many supplements and nutrition orders that are ordered "slip through the cracks" and disappear off of the MAR because the processes in place with paper charting create challenges for Nursing when administering supplements. This is only one example of how the electronic medical documentation will affect my job and benefit our facility and our patients.

Building a new hospital in such a poor economy sounds unnecessary to some, especially in such an economy. Our CEO explained our need for a new facility in a way that made a lot of sense. She talks about the importance of physician recruitment and how small, rural hospitals struggle to recruit and retain physicians because of lack of attractions to the area, among other reasons. Rural hospitals with outdated equipment and facilities really struggle in this area. We have had success in this area recently, but this was mainly because of the plans in place to build a new hospital. She went on to explain if you can't recruit physicians then you cannot provide health care and therefore, there is no hospital and no hospital jobs. This made me realize how much this new facility will impact not only our patients or Wright Memorial employees, but our community. If we want to stay alive as a hospital, we have to be competitive with hospitals from surrounding counties. A new hospital, we hope, will give us an advantage in competition with surrounding hospitals, which means more revenue. More revenue means we can add more services to serve our patients, such as a Diabetes Center in the future, among other things.

Because health care costs will continue to rise, the number of people who are under-insured or uninsured will increase and therefore we will have more patients who will not be able to pay their bills. As a Director, when census is low, I am to flex my staff accordingly. This means that I cut the hours of my staff by a small amount in order to cut expenses.

Currently, many patients refuse my service as an outpatient because their insurance does not reimburse for nutrition counseling unless the patient is diagnosed with diabetes or renal disease. I hope that the health care reform will provide more coverage for preventative heathcare measures, which would include nutrition counseling. The new health care reform will no doubt affect us all. We will have to wait and see what all those changes will mean to us.

I was unsuccessful posting pictures and will hopefully learn to do this better in the near future.