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The nonprofit hospital said Oct. 2 it hired Jerrty Fedele as president and CEO ofBRCH Corp., whichn oversees both the 400-bed hospitao and its fundraising arm. He was a managing director at , a Brentwood, Tenn.-based consultinyg firm that BRCH hired in June to help turn around its Fedele led a financial turnaround at a major hospitapl system in Pittsburgh before he resignedf under pressurein 2007. In addition, the hospital hired Karen Pooleas COO. Poold also worked for FTI Healthcare and was CEO ofin Texas. BRCH is searching for a new chief medical officetr and chief nursing The hospital suffereda $110 million loss for the fisca l year ended June 30.
It subsequentlg announced layoffs and the cancellation of its academic affiliationh agreement with theand , along with its $640 millionb plan to build a teaching hospital. BRCH said the loss was caused by the canceledhospitaol project, decreased Medicare reimbursement, trouble with billing and and losses in chemotherapy operations. Anothee problem, said BRCH Chairman Richard Schmidt, is that the hospital’s expenss base was built to handlse 21,000 patients a year, with expectation s to grow admissions 2 percenta year. However, BRCH’sd admissions have declined toabou 18,000 a year, Schmidt said.
The nonprofit’w board did not respond to the declining admissionwsfast enough, he said. “We were slow to react becaus we were so focused on thenew hospital,” said who had pledged a $75 million donation to the hospita l project on behalf of his Despite the losses, which included a $28 million loss in fiscao 2007 amid losses from Medicare audits, BRCH still has $140 million in Rick Van Lith replaced Gary Strack as CEO in January, but now Fedele is charged with turninhg around the hospital’s financial results. Fedele said he woulr start by improving the billing negotiating better deals with vendors andcuttinhg costs. He said layoffs would be a last resort.
Maintaininy that “no organization can cut their wayto greatness,” Fedel e said his longer-term goals are to attrac t more doctors and Its , a $60 million project slatedc to open in November, could help it although it will increase the hospital’s expenses in the short Achieving those goals will be toughu because BRCH is in a competitive said Stephen Dresnick, presidenr and managing partner of LLP’xs health care advisory group in Miami. ’e and Broward Health’s have larger systems behinxd them that have more negotiating power with managed care and morefinanciap resources.
Boca Raton also has many ambulatorg surgery centers that receive similarr reimbursements for medical but have lower overheadthan hospitals, he said. “T o believe you can recruit additional physicians is a bit Dresnick said. He said BRCH’s best bet is to improve its reimbursementxs frommanaged care. The job looks tough at BRCH, but Fedele said he’d been through worse. Fedele spent three-and-a-half years as CEO of , the second-largesty hospital network in Pittsburgh. Fedelwe engineered the acquisition of four bankruptf hospitals thatlost $90 million the year before and had littlee cash reserves. Even makingy payroll was a problem.
In his last the hospital systemmade $40 million, he said. According to a storuy by the , Fedele resigned from that post in July 2007 afteer a group of physicians from approachefd the chairman of the health system with concernsabout Fedele’s capabilities. Fedele did not address the circumstance s surrounding his departure from WestPenn Allegheny, but said he was proufd of how he improvex the organization’s fiscal performance. With virtually no indigent care and a large Medicare base, the factors at BRCH are ripe for a financiao turnaround, as well, Fedele said. “No organizatioh can survive long-term by relying on its savings he said.
“This is a hospital that oughtr to doexceedingly
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