Changes in health care bring a new way of doing business

Providing health care isn’t what it used to be when a board of well-meaning local businessmen with no particular expertise in medicine would set the course for a hospital. Or when hospitals could get by on folks paying their bills and philanthropists writing the occasional check.

How hospitals provide care and how they balance their books have changed with advances in medicine that brought some amazing results and some astronomical costs. Now insurance companies and the government pay most of the bills. Hospitals are left to bargain with patients who have no coverage and to write off uncollectable debt.

All those changes and more drove Forum Health System into a spiral that ended in bankruptcy court. Last week U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Kay Woods approved Forum’s sale to Community Health Systems, the nation’s largest publicly traded for-profit hospital system. CHS has made a $200 million commitment to come into the Mahoning Valley and to operate the Northside Medical Center in Youngstown, Trumbull Memorial Hospital in Warren and Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital in Howland.

The company is putting up $120 million to cover Forum’s accrued debt and has said it will spend $80 million for improvements over five years. The move protects, at least at the outset, some 3,700 jobs at the three institutions.

Due diligence

CHS has had executives with impressive credentials and experience in the Mahoning Valley in the months leading up to approval of the sale by Woods. The commitments made by CHS to the community met the threshold set by Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, whose approval was needed for the sale of a nonprofit entity.

This is a new chapter for health care in the Valley, with one of the two major providers now operating on a for-profit basis.

But clearly, Community is not coming here with the intention of failing. Executives say that the Forum hospitals will have the full support of a strong team of professionals in medicine, management and patient service at the company’s headquarters. It will be a new way of doing business for the Valley, but the Community officials who have met with Vindicator editors say their strong suit is their ability to bring the industry’s best practices to the facilities that they operate.

They’ve set the bar high for themselves — as new corporate citizens and as health-care providers to the Mahoning Valley. They say they are ready to change any negative perceptions about the performance of their hospitals one patient at a time, which is as good a way to start as any.