[Editor's Note: This is part 8 of a multi-part series of articles on almost six hours of Grant County Commission meetings on Feb. 11 and 13, 2025.)

By Mary Alice Murphy

The Grant County Commission Feb. 11, 2025 work session continued with County Manager Charlene Webb's review of the Feb. 13, 2025 regular meeting.

The next item on the regular meeting agenda was the monthly presentation by Gila Regional Medical Center Chief Executive Officer Robert Whitaker.

He reported that admissions were down a bit in December, but "for year-to-date, we are trending higher than last year. We had 26 deliveries in December, which is about the same."

Whitaker talked about the swing bed service. "It's like a skilled nursing service. We're seen tremendous growth, and we are seeing more patients taking advantage of it."

He noted that surgeries were down because of physicians taking time off around the holidays. "We continue to do quite well with our ER (emergency room) visits. We had 1472 ER visits in December, and we're trending higher than last year. It's about 46 or 47 that we see per day in our emergency room. Outpatient visits in December were about 5,300, which is a good number. Some patients come for outpatient visits every month. We also have our cancer center patients and we see anywhere between 1700 1800 people in our clinics every month."

Whitaker said last year's legislative session had allocated $5.7 million to Gila Regional as provider assessments payments "that we see through the Medicaid service, along with some federal matching dollars. We report these separately in our financial reports just to kind of keep an eye on what our normal operations are, because they'll be large dollars in there. So from normal operations, our operations for December were $8.4 million."

Overall the hospital has a little over $50 million, compared to $45.5 million last year. "Our little facility, right? Our little health system, we're on track to be a $100 million net revenue health system this fiscal year, which is really a big milestone. It's big, pretty impressive in terms of what we do and how many patients we see and take care of."

For the month of December, the GRMC bottom line surplus was $270,000 compared to $140,000 last year at the same time. "Year-to date, we have about a $2 million surplus."

He also pointed out the charity care numbers, and the extra amounts the hospital is receiving beyond operations revenue.

Whitaker noted that two federal grants are still up in the air, with hopes that they will come through. He said year-to-date, the hospital has put about $3 million into capital projects. "We are finishing our telephone project this week, and will start on the telemetry and nurse call systems. New patient beds should arrive next month."

The hospital recruited Dr. Stephanie Leslie as a family medicine physician to the rural health clinic, the family medicine clinic. "We did start interventional radiology service in January and we are getting good feedback and results on that. Our cardiology clinic continues to grow. We hired two physician assistants to work with Dr Ratliff and our cardiology clinic. We have a new general surgeon staring next month. Dr. Lamour used to work here and is coming back."

District 5 Commissioner Tom Shelley asked about charity care and how the hospital defined it.

Whitaker said: "There's a very specific definition of how that qualifies, and that's from an accounting perspective. So our auditors go through qualifying what counts as charity care versus what doesn't, and what we expense as bad debts and write offs. There is a very specific definition of what that is. I don't have that offhand, but there is an application that individuals go through in order to receive charity care, to have that applied to their accounts."

Shelley clarified: "So that doesn't represent all patients who don't have means to pay for care or have insurance?"

Whitaker replied: "No, it doesn't. That represents a smaller portion that's probably about a quarter of what our bad debt expenses. Bad debt is just accounts we can't collect on, and then those individuals who are willing and go through the charity care process, we can allocate dollars for that. And it's kind of a like an accounting function of how the auditors look at our funds and how CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid) separates those out and then works on our reimbursement back to us based on charity care and and bad debt and the differences between them."

The next report will begin with elected official reports at the regular meeting.

To visit the previous articles, please go to https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/grant-county-commission-work-session-021125-part-1; https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/grant-county-commission-work-session-021125-part-2 ; https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/grant-county-commission-work-session-021125-part-3 ; https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/grant-county-commission-work-session-021125-part-4 ; https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/grant-county-commission-work-session-021125-part-5; https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/grant-county-commission-work-session-021125-part-6 ; and https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/grant-county-commission-work-session-021125-and-regular-meeting-021325-part-7