Health center approves $25,800 for ambulance fund

Jefferson County Health Center Board of Trustees approved $25,800 for the ambulance fund to help make up a shortfall in operations for the end of fiscal year 2014.

According to Jefferson County Health Center administrator and CEO Deb Cardin, much of the shortfall was due to the overriding cost of ambulances and their repair, ?which we will no longer need to budget for in 2015? because ambulance vehicle ownership and maintenance has been transferred from Jefferson County to Midwest Ambulance Service.

Cardin said that after the city of Fairfield paid $10,000, along with an extra $15,000, the county paid its usual $25,000, and the health center paid its usual $25,000, there was still around a $2,400 shortage, which the three entities split at $800 each.

?Technically, since this is over my $25,000 authorization limit, the board [needed] to approve $25,800 for the ambulance fund,? said Cardin.

She told the trustees each entity will contribute $25,000 for fiscal year 2015, which should result in a positive bottom line of $2,200 since all expenses are now fixed.

Midwest Ambulance Service has provided ambulance service for Jefferson County since October 2012. It originally contracted with the local entities for a three-year contract, expiring in September 2016. The ambulance transfer agreement made in November included extending the contract four more years to Sept. 30, 2020.

Staff from the Department of Inspection and Appeals made an unannounced visit to Jefferson County Health Center Feb. 17 to determine if the health center was in compliance with certification requirements for critical access hospitals.

According to Cardin, it had been five years since the department last visited the health center, ?and they showed up when we had all this renovation [for the new McCreery Cancer Center] going on.?

She said the inspection usually lasts four days, but the team only spent 2.5 days at the health center because they wanted to leave before the forecasted bad weather arrived.

During the exit interview, inspectors told Cardin it had been a good survey, and the health center staff had been very accommodating.

She also was told: ?You fixed everything before we were even out the door.?

Cardin told the trustees the inspectors had found four noncompliance issues.

One, she said, was the serving portion-size had not yet been added onto a recently revised menu. That information has now been included.

The second was biomedical electrical safety checks of beds had been inadvertently left off the check sheet. The checks are now on the list to be done.

The third was the security of medical records in the Professional Clinic. Cardin said the housekeeping policy has been updated to state that housekeeping staff cannot go into the room alone.

The fourth issue was the wording of the patient rights statement given to patients in the Professional Clinic, the outpatient clinic and other areas of the health center. The health center?s statement did not use the exact same words as the state, explained Cardin. ?Our wording meant the same thing ? I guess they just needed to find something wrong.?

In his monthly financial report to the trustees, chief financial officer Larry Peach said, ?We had a pretty decent January.?

Peach said the health center had ?a pretty good month in regard to patient days.?

The patient days totaled 446, which was 4.2 percent above the budgeted 428.

?Outpatient areas did pretty good,? he continued.

The Jefferson County Health Center?s gross accounts receivable increased slightly by $75,366 to $5,336,772 as of Jan. 31.

A total of 4,156 claims, with a gross value of a little more than $4 million, was filed in January.

?Both were up a little from last month,? said Peach.

The health center ended January with a net income of $247,052, which is above the $14,782 it had budgeted. The center?s year-to-date net income totaled $1,558,970, which is above the $499,233 it had budgeted.