Report touts economic, social impact of hospitals

A doctor at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Providence takes it upon herself to help an Iraq War veteran who’s become homeless get her life back on track. Employees at The Miriam Hospital read to schoolchildren every week. Newport Hospital says “Enough” to obesity.
These are some of many examples cited in a new Hospital Association of Rhode Island report that aims to not just quantify its members’ economic and social impact on the state, but also show the faces and personal stories tucked behind the statistics.
“We talk a lot about numbers when it comes to health care,” said Amanda Barney, director of communications for HARI and author of the report. “But I wanted to have specific examples, real stories of people who have been helped by our hospitals.”
The report, titled “Caring for Rhode Island,” does offer plenty of numbers as well, mostly from the American Hospital Association:
• Hospitals in Rhode Island care for patients on 2.5 million occasions each year, including 126,619 admissions; 13,408 births and 454,840 emergency visits.
• The hospitals’ estimated economic impact in Rhode Island is $2.2 billion per year, and they also attract more than $100 million per year in research funding.
• The hospitals employ more than 23,000 people, or about one of every 18 private-sector workers, and they pay more than $1 billion in wages, or an average of $43,859 in 2005, compared with $37,064 for the private sector as a whole. (Their wages are also rising much faster, 25 percent from 2001 to 2005, versus 15 percent for the state.)
• The hospitals provided $124.4 million in uncompensated care to Rhode Island residents in 2005, including $29.8 million in charity care – discounted and free care for low-income people; $51.5 million in bad debt; and $43.1 million from underpayments by Medicaid.
Many of those figures come up regularly in policy discussions, whether they involve the state’s proposal to require all health care facilities to provide at least 1 percent of their care for free, or pending legislation that would make insurers, not hospitals, collect deductibles and co-payments from their subscribers.
But Barney and HARI President Edward J. Quinlan stressed that the purpose of this report is not to influence specific policy discussions, but rather to help the whole community to better understand the full range of what hospitals do and the circumstances under which they do it.
The hospitals sponsor many health promotion and educational activities, for example, and they want people to know about them so they will participate, Quinlan said.
And the more people know about hospitals’ policies, their community outreach, etc., the likelier they will be to make the best possible use of those resources, Quinlan noted – getting help to enroll in RIte Care and get coverage for prenatal care, perhaps, or monitoring their diabetes so they don’t end up in the emergency room.
Another goal of the report, Quinlan said, is to help the public understand how health care, and hospitals’ role within it, is changing. Hospitals are increasingly partners with government, he noted, on emergency preparedness, community outreach and other efforts. They are also partnering up with one another and with other providers, whether it’s The Westerly Hospital starting a hospice unit with Home & Hospice Care of Rhode Island, or multiple partners joining forces to provide supplies, money and volunteers to the Rhode Island Free Clinic in Providence.
“Hospitals are in a unique position to lead, and they should lead,” Quinlan said. “And I think you lead well when you identify your partners.