McCook, Nebraska—Community Hospital board members met February 20 for their monthly board meeting. During the meeting, directors heard a quarterly report on Community Hospital’s balanced scorecard, approved provider appointments, and endorsed a program presentation to be offered to medical staff.

Balanced Score Card

Jon Reiners, Strategic Planning Manager, as well as the seed champions, updated the board on the latest balanced scorecard results. The balanced scorecard, with  a goal of 6, was 5.69. Five measures went up, ten measures stayed the same and three declined.

The seed champions covered highlights from their written reports. Leanne Miller, people seed chair, reported that 95.2% of employees participated in the PRC employee engagement survey in November 2018. Results of the survey were presented to employees by PRC in late January. Overall As a Place to Work, employees responded with 54.7% excellent for a PRC percentile ranking of 95.2 percentile. They also learned that 50.9% of employees are fully engaged for a PRC ranking of 97.3 percentile.

Karen Kliment Thompson, service seed chair, reported a behavioral health contract is signed and the hospital is recruiting staff. Hospital staff will be re-educated on AIDET in March. AIDET is known as the five fundamentals of effective communication to patients: Acknowledge, Introduce, Duration, Explanation and Thank You. Community Hospital’s wellness program continues to succeed. For community wellness, the hospital, in collaboration with Southwest Nebraska Public Health Department offered the 12 Days of Fitmas exercise challenge with 238 participants, as well as the StrideKick portal through which the challenge was offered. Community Hospital covered the cost of hooded sweatshirts for those who completed the challenge.

Troy Bruntz, chair of the quality seed, said administrative council members and nursing supervisors continue to round on inpatients, which is going well. He said several measures are down, but work continues to increase the scores. Current action plans include work on antimicrobial stewardship, including annual education for medical staff; visual management boards developed as a pilot project in two departments. Five more departments have begun implementation. Two other projects under the quality seed include the stroke designation project and the chronic heart failure readmission project.

Sean Wolfe, finance seed chair, reported that with the improved volumes and commercial revenue, operating margin is very strong at 5.00%; back where the hospital averaged from FY 2013-2016 before the very difficult years of 2017 and 2018. He also reported on Days Cash on Hand: As of December 31, 2018 the hospital has spent $1.8M of the $5.2M of funds committed to the construction project. This commitment will take the Days Cash from 161 down to about 134. Savings must be rebuilt up to 180 days of cash from there. This will be helped out tremendously in May when Community Hospital makes its final Thayer County Bank payment on the patient wing, freeing up $220k per month until payments on the current project are required.

He also shared the financial performance of Community Hospital was improved by implementing the Point of Service Collections Improvement Plan, adding charge transparency on Community Hospital’s website, and revising the bad debt estimation process.

Consent Agenda

Minutes were approved from the January 2 regular meeting of the board of directors regarding performance and operational procedures, the January 16 regular meeting of the board of directors and the January regular meeting of the board of directors regarding budget and finance.

Action to Be Taken

The board approved an amendment to revise some of the committees in the medical staff bylaws. They also made a motion to support the antimicrobial stewardship educational program offered to area physicians on March 25. Appointments for affiliate staff were approved including Tasha Blomstedt, new physician assistant, who will provide emergency room coverage. Also, appointments were approved for courtesy staff, reappointments for affiliate staff, reappointments for courtesy medical staff and reappointments for telemedicine staff.

Strategic Discussion

Under strategic discussion/updates, the board was informed that Rose Remington, M.D., family medicine physician at McCook Clinic, retired on January 31. They also learned that Richard Klug, also a family medicine physician at McCook Clinic, will be moving from full-time to part-time status in June. He will work at McCook Clinic two days a week, as well as see patients at Curtis Medical Center and Trenton Medical Clinic once a month.