Booneville Hospital Begins Transition To Mercy [Times Record, Fort Smith, Ark.]

Nov. 02--Booneville Community Hospital began a two-month transition phase Friday that puts it under Mercy Fort Smith management.

By the beginning of 2014, the hospital will be known as Mercy Hospital-Booneville, with Mercy leasing the 5-year-old hospital from the Booneville Community Hospital Trust Inc. An announcement of the merger was made Oct. 10.

"There is a lot of activity required to transition a new hospital to Mercy," says Laura Keep, communications director at Mercy Fort Smith. "This includes preparing to install EPIC, Mercy's electronic health record system that allows a single record to follow patients throughout all Mercy hospitals and clinics, providing for greater continuity of care."

To offer expanded services to patients in the region, initial strategic planning is also underway, she said, to coordinate care between Booneville and Mercy's other critical access hospitals in Waldron, Paris and Ozark.

Booneville Community Hospital CEO David Hill has said the merger is a "wonderful opportunity."

"It will help the hospital recruit new physicians and bring additional medical and surgical services to the residents that we serve," Hill added.

Opened in 2008, Booneville Community Hospital is an $18 million facility with 25 private patient rooms and a 24-hour emergency department. It has X-ray, computerized tomography (CT), ultrasound and bone densitometry technology, as well lab services and specialty clinics.

"While community hospitals are critical resources in the community, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to operate independently," said Ryan Gehrig, president of Mercy Hospital Fort Smith. "Working together, we can maintain and improve the services this vital facility offers the community."

A major benefit to the merger, Gehrig added, would be the availability of Mercy physicians to hold periodic clinics at the Booneville hospital. Coupled with telemedicine, this could provide improvements to the community's health-care options.

Mercy Fort Smith has 365 beds and employs more than 2,400 co-workers. It is part of St. Louis-based Mercy, the nation's sixth largest Catholic health-care system. Booneville's hospital and clinic has about 100 full-time employees.

"In this day and time, it's a lot harder for a small-town hospital to make it independently. It's so much easier to be a satellite, and have these overheads like billing taken care of," Booneville Mayor Jerry Wilkins said. "It cuts overhead costs, so we won't have to spend a million dollars to switch over to this new coding system with the Affordable Care Act. Mercy is a very respected hospital. Most all of the satellites around here are with Mercy, and this puts the whole group together. I think it will make it better."

Since 2010, the Booneville hospital has been on a road to recovery, with an overhaul that included a replacement of the all but one member of a seven-member board of directors. Hill was hired as the new CEO in August 2012.

The Booneville hospital has seen financial hardship that culminated in $1.5 million in uncompensated services in 2012. There was also a decline in outpatient services and a census drop of 0.6 patients per day that led to an operational loss of $87,000 in February, with an overall loss of $144,000.

Booneville citizens approved a 1 percent sales tax in 2003 to support the hospital's operation. In 2007, the tax issue was amended to pledge a 1/4 of its annual revenue toward construction of the new 25-bed facility. The tax raises between $42,000 and $45,000 a month, Wilkins said. Additional funding comes from the federal government, private insurance and private payments. With the principal and $90,000 monthly interest payment, the entire monthly payment on the hospital is about $112,000.

The city leases the hospital to the nonprofit Booneville Community Hospital Trust for a minimal fee of $100 a month, Wilkins said. And the city oversees collection and disbursement of the 1 percent sales tax that pays for the building, but hospital management is independent of city government. Ownership of the hospital will revert to the city upon retirement of the bonded debt. The payout schedule is for 40 years.

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