State Health Commissioner Visits Elbert Memorial Hospital

By David Stephens, WSGC Radio, Elberton

Commissioner Clyde Reese with the Department of Community Health was in Elberton recently to visit and tour Elbert Memorial Hospital.

In addition to his tour of the hospital, a presentation was held to talk about the challenges that Elbert Memorial faces.  Elbert County Board of Commissioners Chair Tommy Lyon talked about the importance of the county having a hospital.

“Our commissioners have been very supportive of the hospital, our people have also been very supportive of the hospital”, said Lyon. “We can’t afford to lose it. We only have about 8,800 jobs in the county. We’re forecasted not to grow between now and 2030. We’re going to pick up like 72 people, so we are in a direr stretch where we have to keep every job we can and we have to keep it in house.”

Elbert Memorial CEO Jim Yarborough touched on how the hospital is getting paid and reimbursed.

“We have such a large percentage in this low pay/no pay category that we are going to have to carry the costs of those services. You can see that 25 percent of our services are private pay, and we are only getting about 12 percent of that”, explained Yarborough. “If you look at the total dollar we receive, we get about 12 cents from private, 44 cents from Medicare, and about 20 cents from Medicaid and so forth.”

That information came as no surprise to Commissioner Reese, who said what Elbert Memorial is facing, is a common trend in the state.

“The challenges that you are facing with Medicaid paying a good chunk of your costs, and Medicaid is the payer of last resort and Medicare is always higher, so these are things that all facilities, even the larger ones are experiencing”, said Reese.
Reese says the Department of Community Health is actively looking for ways to help smaller communities.

“So we have some limitations and there are some things in the smaller communities we are looking at such as access to healthcare from the global perspective. We are talking about the after hours, the urgent care, and the EMS services”, said Reese. “We have this committee looking at rural areas trying to see what we can do. It is hard to make global decisions because every community is different.”

The Commissioner says his visit to Elbert Memorial is real helpful because it helps him get an idea of different system things that can be improved and the impact those decisions may or may not have.