Hospital sees profits

Roosevelt General Hospital finished the last fiscal year with a profit of more than $115,000, in spite of seeing losses in June, the chief financial officer has said.

At the hospital board meeting Tuesday at RGH, hospital CFO Eva Stevens reported on the past fiscal year and the budget for this fiscal year.

Last fiscal year, the hospital was $8,000 over budget, which Stevens said was very close, considering the amount of money the hospital handles.

In June, she said, RGH saw a loss of $121,000 overall, with the clinic sustaining half the loss and the hospital sustaining the other half. In-patient revenue was down, Stevens said.

“I think that those numbers will pick up,” she said.

Stevens attributed the losses to doctors being on vacation and said Dr. Alvaro Rosales, a new internal medicine and geriatrics practitioner, would help bring revenue up with his patients.

For the current fiscal year’s budget, she and department heads worked to cut costs without laying off employees.

Those methods include hiring substitute employees to cover for regular workers who are off. Stevens said the hospital doesn’t have to provide benefits for the substitutes, and their work would cut down on overtime pay for regular employees. Also, the hospital is cutting back on maintenance contracts, having staff take online training courses instead of traveling for continuing education and handling doctors’ contracts differently.

Stevens said major changes in the budget are the addition of two doctors with established patient bases and an increase to $600,000 in the sole community provider payments from the government. However, with the rise in sole community provider money, the amount of matching money, which comes from the Roosevelt County indigent fund, will also increase.

Also, Stevens expects the Clovis health clinic to undergo an inspection to have its designation as rural health clinic reinstated, which will increase federal reimbursements for treatment of Medicaid and Medicare patients.

In other business, board members:

• approved the budget report for last fiscal year and the budget for this fiscal year.

• heard the hospital has two applicants to interview for its director of nursing position.

• heard the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners received a $15,000 grant for a rape crisis hotline.