Administrator’s Bi-Weekly Review For Year Ending March 18th, 2023

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community
Administrator’s Bi-Weekly Review
For Year Ending March 18^th – Plus “COVID UPDATE #79”

As we approach the end of a winter season, we demonstrated continued elevated demand for services the past couple of weeks. Please note a higher than usual number of our metrics exceeding goal! Of course as I say this, we just experienced a discharge of our only in-house overnight admission. So goes the ebbs and flows of rural medicine. A breather is perhaps in order following a quite busy stretch. But outpatient work remains very robust!

A couple of promising new or revised services have been evaluated in the past couple of weeks, with vendors representing a turnkey approach to both in-house Nuclear Medicine and Pulmonary Rehab services which offer very encouraging programs for our cardiac and compromised breathing populations. If the review of the next set of data points looks as good, we will elevate this review to the Medical Staff and Board for their consideration. Optimizing space is still a big consideration.

March COVID numbers remain very soft in our County, as only two reported positives hit us through March 22nd. New rules and guidelines are getting sent out by CMS and other federal programs as to how some of the relaxed reimbursement criteria during the pandemic will be resumed in the tighter formats once May 11th arrives. This will further challenge hospitals and other providers who have been struggling to regain margins equal to pre-Covid times, before costs of care increased so dramatically.

As March madness hits its tournament midpoint, it was great to see the dynamic win by the Wildcats last night! Keep it going Cats! Thanks again to all of you who put our patients FIRST!! Have a great next couple of weeks!