By Patrick Gerveler, Executive Vice President/Chief Financial Officer, Blessing Health System

The Blessing Health System is the community’s health system - there are no far away corporate headquarters and no Wall Street executives to answer to. We not only serve, but also report to our communities. A challenge our communities face, as do all towns in America, is the expense of healthcare.

Expenses are caused by a variety of needs: the recruitment of the best doctors and caregivers, purchases of the latest technology, and the fact the health system never closes. Blessing Hospital is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Typically, if a business is going to lower prices, they need to either sell more or lower expenses – or both. Blessing Health System is doing both. Every employee at Blessing has been involved in this effort to bring our expenses down and to offer new care options that lower your costs.

Here are some examples of over $11 million in savings to patients, employers and Medicare:

  • The Walk-In Clinic provides an alternative for non-emergent cases that don’t require an Emergency Room visit.The charge for the Walk-In Clinic is significantly lower than the Emergency Room. This has resulted in savings to our patients of $5,500,000 a year.
  • We filed with Medicare to move our Ambulatory Surgery Center to what is called a “Free Standing” surgery center. We are passing along over $6 million in savings to our patients, employers and Medicare as a result of this action.
  • We no longer charge for self-administered drugs for patients hospitalized for observation. This initiative allows us to pass on over $450,000 a year in savings to those patients.

While delivering these savings, we continue to provide care for those who cannot afford it. Last year, we invested over $10 million in free and subsidized care.

Some ways we’ve invested to improve the health of our communities:

  • We expanded to provide heart catheterization including stenting and open heart surgery, and built an electrophysiology lab to treat complex heart arrhythmia issues.
  • We built a hybrid operating room to offer the latest procedures and attract surgeons.

Just as it is with your household budget, our attention to your healthcare cost is a never-ending responsibility. It requires involvement by physicians, patients, employers, Medicare and Medicaid and the insurers. Only through partnerships and cooperation will our communities be successful in making healthcare affordable, accessible and accountable. We will continue providing quality care to you and your loved ones, while being mindful of costs.