Hospitals run by Sisters of Charity in South Carolina and Billings Montana are in the News.Providence Hospital Northeast has scaled back its expansion plans after state health officials last month rejected a request to add 50beds.
The facility’s owner, Sisters of Charity Providence Hospitals, cut the initial $58.8 million expansion request to one adding 11 beds and costing roughly $10 million.The beds would be added during a renovation that would not increase space at the hospital, said spokeswoman Dawn Catalano.
The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control is scheduled to rule on the scaled-back request by Sept. 28.
The agency ruled in August that bed-use at Providence Northeast had not been increasing for long enough period to justify adding 50 beds. Although the hospital showed it needed some more general acute-care beds, DHEC official Joel Grice said under-used nursing-home beds at the hospital could be used instead.
Lexington Medical Center opposed the initial request after Providence Hospital successfully lobbied against the Lexington
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From Billings Montana…
“Quality costs less,” said Michelle Hood, chief executive officer at St. Vincent. “There’s no doubt about that. It drives inefficiencies out.” She noted that St. Vincent has held its cost increases below the rate of inflation for the past three years. …
St. Vincent Healthcare will be the first hospital in its nine-hospital group to “go live” in February 2007 with a $105 million IT system that eventually will serve all the Sisters of Charity hospitals.
Hood admits it’s hard to point to specific ways in which that large investment will be recouped. Investing $100 million in IT doesn’t automatically increase revenues by a similar amount. But she expects the system to improve patient safety, reduce medical errors and ensure that the hospitals use best practices.
“It’s really an investment in our infrastructure essential to advancing our practice of medicine in this community,” she said.
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