Hospital CEO awarded bonus

RITZVILLE – East Adams Rural Healthcare board members approved a $20,000 bonus for CEO Corie Fedie, at their July 22 meeting. The amount awarded, on his one-year anniversary with the hospital district, was out of $25,000 possible in the CEO's contract.

Board Chairman John Kragt said Fedie hit all but one of this target goals outlined in his contract.

The first goal, based on net revenue over the past 12 months, earned Fedie $5,000 with net revenue at $1,005,301 from June 2019 - June 2020. A "total margin" bonus of $10,000 was awarded for a 9.05 percent increase over the past year. An "employee satisfaction" bonus of $5,000 was awarded for a 68.16% positive response on an employee-engagement survey.

A $5,000 "physician recruitment" bonus was withheld. At the July 22 board meeting, Fedie reported three candidates were interviewed, one of whom was not interested in working in the emergency room. He said another candidate wants an in-person visit in September, but would not be available until summer 2021.

"Worse case scenario is, we could always bring in locums," Fedie said.

Fedie reported new Chief Financial Officer Kimberly Polanco will join the team August 3; in time for one week of transition with the interim CFO.

When Chairman of the Board John Kragt asked if the new CFO has critical care access background, Fedie responded "no, but she has significant experience with state healthcare organizations and broad exposure with long term care, and a background in care in general."

"She is aware of cost reporting and has experience managing those," Fedie said. "She has many years in various healthcare environments; years of state, public, rural healthcare environments and knows a lot about the revenue cycle."

Fedie also reported for the finance committee at the board meeting.

"Things continue to go well, this last year has been tremendous," Fedie said. "The last six months, from a revenue perspective, has been amazing – COVID and all," Fedie said.

Fedie said data entry in the last month was "some of the most consistent in a long time."

"Through teamwork, the amount of charges and gross revenues have come up a little bit, because we are documenting and accounting for every service we provide. We had some trouble with that in the past, but Kelly (Wiggins) and her team are streamlining that," Fedie said. "We are moving in a solid direction, and I'm pleased we've got such a great bunch of people. The community should be proud of this little hospital."

Chairman John Kragt commended the hospital district.

"When I look at these numbers, we are about 13% under in projected revenue for the year on gross, but I have to think most facilities are 40-50% with all the elected surgeries," Kragt said. "On net, we are obviously quite a bit under there, but on expenses, we've managed to keep those five percent under budget at this point, which is pretty awesome. So we're keeping the budget where we need to be, and revenue's not lagging behind as bad as I know a lot of similarly-situated facilities are."

In his medical staff report, Dr. Sackmann stated the "COVID turnaround time" was roughly 73 hours now.

"That's not bad compared to other places," Sackmann said.

He said schedules were now set through December.

"We seem to be dealing well with all the ppe (personal protective equipment), getting rules down and being safe," Sackmann reported.

In other business, board members

- Heard the corrected bylaws will be presented for approval at the next meeting.

- Approved accounts payable warrants vouchers amounting to $444,442, with an additional $290,804 for payroll direct deposits and $100,533 in payroll tax deposits.