HSH board updated on several items

At the July Hot Springs Health (HSH) board meeting held in their conference room. During the inspirational story session, CEO Scott Alwin recognized Chief Clinical Officer Dan Hemann and congratulated him on completing his MBA degree recently, which he accomplished ahead of schedule.

In the medical staff report, Dr. Mattson Mathey said, “We’re still working toward our goals for 30-day returns and readmission.” Regarding their trauma committee, Mathey said, “We had a little bit of a discussion about how to avoid a backlog. Like last time, we were looking for a new trauma coordinator and have some additional people helping with that.” Also, Mathey reported that the lab passed its inspection and that a new chemistry analyzer is coming. 

For the board education discussion, CEO Alwin said that they discussed the financial turnaround during the existential crisis, part one and part two. Alwin asked the trustees how they felt their role change as a result of the pandemic. Some of the answers included being more inquisitive about asking deeper questions, being supportive of their health care workers, and also concerns about meeting their budget needs. Chairman Dr. Bill Williams added to the conversation about what happens to the hospital after the influx of Covid bailout funding ends. There was also conversation about the probability of 600 to 800 hospitals across the nation that might close. 

CEO Alwin added, “I think the thing that stood out to me is the importance of really strategizing and being willing to help make the hard decisions when it is hard, but being able to be realistic and be able to step back and say what’s working and what’s not working, but what also is going to be able to support our mission and make sure that we’re keeping up with our mission and our vision of the organization.”

In the CEO report, Scott Alwin said that on July 10, they interviewed a candidate for a CRNA and are looking to make an offer to him. Regarding their Service Excellence workshops, Alwin said “they went very well. We had 100% completion of everyone with a badge that included board members, employees, providers, interns, travelers, staff and med students. Everybody was a part of it. And when you look across the country, of all the hospitals that have been affiliated with custom learning systems, we’re actually the anomaly. That doesn’t happen very often. And they were so impressed that [they] asked us to bring a team to the national conference and do a breakout session to share with the other hospitals on how we strategize for that, how we scheduled those workshops and how and why we were successful. So I’m pretty proud of the group with that.”

Alwin continued and said, “The next phase of the initiative we’re going to be launching what are called DOIT projects. The acronym stands for Departmental Organized Improvement Tactics, which basically are department specific process improvement projects that are derived from and brought up by the frontline staff. So as the frontline staff, take a look at the variety of different intake or reports such as patient satisfaction surveys or our listening post as they call them, or it might be other employees who have offered suggestions or feedback, they will then within the department, be able to strategize a plan to make improvements and improve either the quality or the patient experience, the employee experience, or process improvements for efficiencies.”

Regarding their service recovery kits being utilized so far, Alwin said, “I think we’ve got five service recovery usages in the month of July. And what that shows us is that our frontline staff are recognizing this situation and they’re taking action and mitigating right away before something becomes a bigger problem. And so we’re pretty impressed and happy to have them preserving our customer satisfaction and loyalty.”

Regarding the quality pillar, Alwin said that they had a successful CLIA survey. The last time, two years ago, they had a survey where there were 29 deficiencies. This year, they only had three. Alwin said it was “a major difference” and he was “very, very proud of the lab team and their hard work.”

Alwin also addressed clarity events and reported how they are to be submitted to bring about resolutions to issues. Alwin will hold town hall meetings every three months to give the staff the opportunity to learn and communicate with Alwin.

In the financial report, CEO Kevin Benson said, “We finished the year with a good month. It was a very high revenue month. There’s a lot of activity going on. We were able to then close out the year essentially with a very bottom line, not the operating margin that they want us to see, But that was, I guess, as good as we could hope for given all the challenges during the last year. We’re focused on some year end reporting. We have our budget, which is done at the county, and so that will be submitted. We also have some USDA reporting that we have to complete for our annual compliance.”

Regarding their audit, Benson said, “Most of the work that we were able to upload to their information, that data and reports and reconciliations to their portal.”

Under the people pillar, Chief Human Resources Officer Linda Veylupek said, “Our employee turnover for Fiscal Year 2023 ended at 18.05%, which I was pretty excited about. We had set our goal at 23.15%, which based on the numbers we’d gotten through several reporting areas that was going to be a stretch goal even there. So I’m really happy that we were able to get it down to 18.05 and look forward to continuing through our two different Oasis teams. Through custom learning systems, we’ve got the onboarding and retention team, which is just finishing up the staffing fix and will now really be focusing on making onboarding a much more meaningful process for new hires, as well as what we can do to keep our existing staff. And the award and recognition team also has similar goals of how do we continue to recognize our staff and add value to what they’re doing in the form of recognition.” 

Veylupek also said, “The other thing I just want to touch on briefly is our worker’s comp safety and risk survey that we just completed. We’re really excited about that. When I first started, they had just gone through one of these and had a lot of defects that had to be addressed and deficiencies, and so we just went through this one and there were nine minor deficiencies noted, and they were deficiencies like in a storage room, there was a fire extinguisher that was not in a holder, it was just sitting on the floor. So easy fixes.” After other easy fixes, Veylupek said they submitted their plans of corrections which resulted in a discount of their workers comp rates.

In new business, the date for the August meeting was moved to August 22 at 6:30 p.m.