Last week, the Gunnison Valley Hospital (GVH) Board of Trustees gave Gunnison County Commissioners an update on the hospital’s staffing, budget and housing status. Since the board’s last update at the beginning of the year, not much has changed on the traveler-to-full-time staff ratio. Contract labor continues to account for about 6% of overall staff, and the Senior Care Center (SCC) remains at 15%, the hospital system’s highest traveler usage.
GVH’s “People First,” team (based on a “People First” tenet in the “Super Six” strategic plan) has made some progress, said Chief Executive Officer Jason Amrich. The hospital continues to offer tuition reimbursements for qualified staff and is increasing access to mental health and trauma counseling. GVH is also offering some technical tools, like memberships to meditation app Headspace and career development tools on LinkedIn Learning.
GVH recently brought on a full-time housing coordinator, Tyler Stribling. The role is meant to ensure that none of the hospital's housing units go unused, especially as executives plan to either master lease or own between 40 to 50 units in the next three to four years. Already, some “touchy” issues have cropped up surrounding the current units, Amrich said, including a former employee refusing to leave a home and another not caring for a unit.
“It's interesting as you turn from employer to also landlord, all the things that go along with that. It could create some potential awkward moments, especially if employment is no longer needed or available …. How do you then move through the landlord-tenant arrangement?” Amrich told the Times.
The hospital is not the only public entity questioning that tenuous relationship. Just weeks ago, when the Gunnison Watershed School District considered offering its employees housing, Superintendent Leslie Nichols inquired about the same issue: what happens to someone’s housing when that housing is contingent on a job?
“If we can house people while they work for us, but then once they no longer work for us, they have to leave the valley where they raised a family, I don't know quite what the options are,” Nichols said in the meeting.
As of now, GVH's housing is fully contingent on employment with the hospital. Executives are in active conversations with legal counsel to “truly understand where employment law starts and stops and where tenant and landlord law starts and stops,” Amrich said.
In terms of housing coming online, seven high-efficiency units in the old Senior Care Center are meant to open at the end of July. These units will be offered free or at a “greatly reduced cost” to current SCC staff to incentivize them into full-time positions.
Budget update
GVH books got a bit of a break in the first few months of the year, coming in nearly $1.5 million in net revenue. In contrast to state-wide hospital trends, GVH experienced stronger than expected demand in the first few months. Surgical admissions and patient days exceeded budgeted expectations.
The positive income lines dropped off in April, which Interim CFO Greg Majors attributed to the somewhat seasonal nature of the business. From March to April, revenue dropped nearly a million dollars.
“It really signifies both the seasonality of what we're dealing with and just how tenuous healthcare is,” Amrich said.
GVH is currently restaffing most of its senior financial leadership. After Mark VanderVeer resigned at the start of the year, executives started looking for another chief financial officer. Amrich said the hospital is currently looking at three “highly qualified” candidates. Other open roles in the financial office include a director of revenue cycle and senior financial analyst.
“With where we're at in healthcare today, you need a really strong kind of army tactical team, almost a special forces team, to help us fight the fight when it comes to revenue cycle,” Amrich said.
GVH also signed a contract with electronic health record provider UC Health. The contract, which was “more on the expensive side,” will pay out over the next decade, Amrich said, as it creates an “affiliate” relationship with UC Health which gives GVH access to processes and policies that may allow cost reductions in the future. The program will not only streamline the hospital’s own record-keeping and offer cost savings, but allow better communication with larger referral hospitals like St. Mary’s Medical Center in Grand Junction.
(Abby Harrison can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or abby@gunnisontimes.com.)
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