Page 60 - BusinessWest Macrh 6, 2023

“The past three years have been particularly challenging,” she said, cit- ing everything from staffing issues to the aging of the population and the pressures they put on hospitals. “What COVID laid bare is that all of these issues are there, and that it’s incumbent on us to be creative, accelerate the solutions, and leverage a lot of the tools that we were in many ways reti- cent to use, such as telehealth and virtual visits.
“While this situation has challenged us, it has also provided us with an opportunity to think differently, to treat patients differently, to engage differ- ently — with our patients and with the community,” Watkins went on, add- ing that she and her team at CDH are working to taking full advantage of that opportunity.
Spiras Hatiras, president and CEO on Holyoke Medical Center (HMC), concurred. In remarks made to BusinessWest for its annual Economic Outlook, he spoke of both challenge and opportunity, on several fronts, but especially when it comes to workforce issues.
The ongoing workforce crisis, while it has impacted all sectors, has put healthcare providers, and especially hospitals, at an extreme disadvantage, especially when it comes to nursing and the need to fill vacancies with contract or ‘travel’ nurses, which can cost two or three times what a staff nurse might, Hatiras noted.
“In healthcare, there is a great deal of concern, and the most concern- ing part is the continuing shortage of personnel, which has created this market for temporary staffing at rates that are truly outrageous,” he said. “To put things in perspective, we have about 20 nurses on temporary staff that we get through agencies. Those 20 nurses, on an annual basis, cost us $5 million; each nurse costs us $250,000 because the rates are exorbitant — the nurses get a lot of money, but there’s also a middleman that makes untold amounts of money from this crisis.
“As a nation, the federal government is doing a lot of things — they did some things with railroad workers, they’re helping Ukraine, they’re talking about a lot of things. They should have stepped in and regulated this and said, ‘the pandemic created a tremendous amount of shortage; we cannot allow private companies to go out and profit from that shortage of staffing and bring hospitals to their knees.’ With all this, it’s going to be very dif- ficult for hospitals to cope, and that’s why all our strategy centers around finding a way to attract nurses here.”
For this issue, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at the fiscal chal-
lenges facing hospitals today, and what must happen for these institutions to weather this severe storm.
Dollars and Sense
When asked how hospitals arrived at this inflection point, as he called it, Roose said it was a combination of factors, but, as he and others noted earlier, it comes down to an exacerbation of, to borrow an industry term, some pre-existing conditions.
These include a trend toward outpatient, rather than inpatient, care,
DR. ROBERT ROOSE
“There’s no way to sugarcoat it — hospitals and health systems across Massachusetts, and across the majority of the country, are finding themselves struggling in many regards, and at an inflection point where there are going to need to be continued efforts to support hospi-
tals, or there will continue to be systems and hospitals that remain in distress.”
which certainly impacts overall revenues, and also shortages on the work- force front, which increase the cost of doing business in many ways, and sharp rises in prices of ... well, just about everything, from medications to PPE.
“We’ve been dealing with the aftershocks of one of the most significant public-health crises of our time,” Roose explained. “And it occurred at a point where many shifts in healthcare were already underway, including
a shift from inpatient care toward the delivery of care in a lower-cost out- patient, ambulatory setting where the trends of consumers, our patients, were beginning to change, but where the reimbursement for those services had not been able to keep up with those changes. This was layered on top
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