Officials at Bon Secours Hospital are asking the state for $5 million to keep the struggling hospital afloat for a year while they devise a new strategy to offer health care to a troubled West Baltimore community.
The company and the religious order that oversee Bon Secours have not ordered its closure. But executives say the hospital needs an infusion of cash and a new vision to avoid shutting its doors.
"We are losing millions to an old system that cannot be sustained in the future," said Richard J. Statuto, CEO of the hospital's parent company, Marriottsville-based Bon Secours Health System Inc.
The hospital lost $22 million last year - the largest loss in a decade, according to the state agency that sets the rates that hospitals can charge. But Bon Secours has had problems for many years sustaining a profit in a community where most of its patients are poor, very sick and without insurance.
Dr. Samuel L. Ross, the hospital's CEO, took over two years ago and pledged to confront inefficiencies. He replaced senior management, got more stringent about billing, and last year laid off 80 people from a staff of 900. But the losses continued.
"The reality is if the hospital is not able to achieve the financial turnaround - and get the support to do that - there has to be an honest look at whether or not there is closure," Ross said.
House and Senate budget conferees in Annapolis are considering the hospital's request, among many other issues. The full General Assembly must adopt a budget before the session ends Monday.
Ross said that even if the hospital has to close, officials hope Bon Secours can continue to deliver outpatient health care and social services in West Baltimore.
An institution where senior executives open meetings with prayer, leaders say they are committed to the same ministry established by the Sisters of Bon Secours when they opened the hospital in 1919. But they say they cannot continue to sink millions more into a health care model that is broken.
Bon Secours suffers from a downward spiral that has small inner-city hospitals fighting to survive nationwide: Poor patients, high costs and low reimbursement rates.
Most patients have Medicare or Medicaid, government insurance programs which reimburse at lower rates than private companies, while some patients have no insurance at all. The hospital's uncompensated care equals 18 percent of its gross revenue - more than twice the state average.
