Stephens Co. Hospital Receives FY 16 Audit

Stephens County Hospital’s annual audit confirms what the hospital had already projected regarding the finances for Fiscal Year 2016.

The Hospital Authority received and approved the audit report for the hospital’s Fiscal Year 2016, which ended back on September 30, at its monthly meeting on Monday.

First and foremost, Hospital Administrator Lynne Anderson said the audit report came back with the desired clean opinion.

“We are thrilled to have a clean opinion,” said Anderson. “We have had clean opinions in the past, so that is just an indication to us that we are doing the right things and good confirmation coming from our external auditors.”

Last October, Stephens County Hospital informed the county commission and the public that it was estimating it took a loss of $4.2 million in Fiscal Year 2016.

Anderson said the audit confirmed those initial projections.

“We were exactly on it, so there were no surprises in the audit,” said Anderson.

When making that October announcement, the hospital pinned much of the loss on low volume and low payment reimbursements to the hospital.

Anderson said those are trends that Stephens County Hospital has continued to see into the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2017.

“We are continuing to see decreased volumes, decreased re-imbursements and an increase in the contractuals, which means that we have to write off to bad debt things that we can not collect and we did discuss this with the auditors and they are finding that across the country, so we continue to work on that and we will be trying to implement things to improve our revenue as we go forward in this fiscal year,” said Anderson.

Stephens County Hospital’s audit was performed by the firm of Dixon Hughes Goodman.