Doctors Hospital is on life support no more. The hospital filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001, having reopened in 2000 after lying dormant for several years for lack of funding. But by 2004, the hospital’s gross revenue was projected at $30 million, with net income of close to $5 million. Hospital CEO Paul Taylor said the rebirth was not an easy process. “We lost money the first year as the community was relearning the fact that we were here and as we added services on campus,” Taylor said. “We lost, I think, about $3.5 million in our first year. We kept improving though; we kept getting stronger, adding new patients and adding new services. The second year we lost about $1.5 million, but most of that we lost in the first half of the year – we were around the break-even point in the second half of 2001.” It was at that point that Taylor and the 20 other doctor-owners decided to file for Chapter 11 restructuring. Taylor said the decision made sense even though the company’s outlook was improving. “Once we got to the point where we were breaking even, I felt the prudent thing to do would be to place the corporation in Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to restructure some of our long-term debt and spread out the amortization schedules,” he said. The hospital had its first profitable year in 2002, and now the facility is doing so well that it is expanding. A second location in Nixa’s Crimson Plaza opened in late 2004, and a 12,000-square-foot expansion for the Nixa facility is already in the works. But the growth doesn’t stop there. The main location of Doctors Hospital, 2828 N. National, plans to add a new wing to expand Resolutions, the hospital’s geriatric psychiatry unit. The Resolutions unit currently holds 10 beds, about eight of which are filled on an average day. The expansion would increase the number of available beds to 15 or 16. The group also is purchasing a building near the Partnership Industrial Center, which would allow the hospital to move some of its services off the main campus and expand the number of inpatient beds from 34 – 10 of which are for Resolutions – to a total of 45. Taylor said the expansion is necessary because business is growing, especially in the main hospital’s inpatient unit. “Over the last half of the year, we’ve been full most of the time. We have been filling between 18 and 24 beds during the last half of last year and the first half of this year,” he said. “We also see 55 patients a day in our urgent care; 125 patients a day in our Medicaid clinic, which we call our primary care clinic; and in our physicians clinic, doctors and other providers are seeing another 100 patients a day. Northside Senior Care Clinic is seeing 25 to 30 a day, and Nixa is seeing about 125 a day in family care,” Taylor said. That rapid growth has led to a corresponding increase in employment; the hospital went from 250 employees in January 2004 to around 450 now. And those employees are in line to get an ownership stake in the organization, via a new employee stock ownership plan in the works. Taylor said the plan should be in place this year. “We’re waiting on some of the professionals to do their work, but we have our financing in place,” he said. “It needs to happen sometime in 2005 – I promised the employees that the first effective plan year would be 2005.” One unique feature of the hospital is its funding; 80 percent comes from Medicare and Medicaid patients, while just 13 percent comes from commercial insurance. “I can tell you this: that’s a really unusual payer mix for a for-profit hospital,” Taylor said. So what’s responsible for the hospital’s rapid and dramatic turnaround? Taylor said that “turnaround” isn’t really the best word for what’s happened at Doctors Hospital. “What I always tell people when they use the word turnaround is that there was no real turnaround here. This was a start-up,” Taylor said. “It’s impossible to start up a new hospital and not lose money the first year. We lost more money than I wanted to, and frankly lost more money than we could afford to lose. It was difficult for us, but the employees here and the ownership committee were committed to making this work, and had it not been for that commitment, we wouldn’t have made it.” [[In-content Ad]]
