by
Olga Deshchenko, DOTmed News Reporter | August 06, 2010
"A critical access hospital is trying to build a new building and the challenge it has is due to the financial conditions, its local bank, which is the main source of capital, provided a fixed amount of funding that it would not exceed," says Sandstrom. "When the building cost, and specifically the equipment they wanted, exceeded that, they were told 'no' by the bank. The bank was able to provide leverage to a certain point."
In situations like these, Siemens Financial Services serves as an alternate source of funding.
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"When the local bank is effectively tapped out, Siemens can come in and provide additional financing on top that the bank won't," says Sandstrom.
The company also provides "bridge financing" to hospitals looking to implement IT systems.
"We can bring financing to community hospitals to help bridge the time period from the time you need to invest to get your IT systems up and running at a higher level to the time that federal incentives are available to pay for that investment," says Sandstrom.
Since Siemens is heavily involved in the health care industry, Sandstrom says it has a particular perspective that helps it work with critical access hospitals on securing financing for their needs.
"We look at it from our viewpoint, we understand equipment and we can view equipment as collateral and provide additional financing where the local bank might not," he says.
Going forward
Many critical access hospitals are now working on improving their patient satisfaction and quality reporting practices. Rollins Brook Community Hospital is already reporting its results, even though it's not mandated to do so.
Jake Richer, TriMedx
engineer, works on
a Philips Brilliant 64-slice
CT scanner.
"I firmly believe that, although at this point in time, the federal government is not requiring critical access hospitals to report their quality or patient satisfaction results, that it's going to at some point soon make that requirement of critical access hospitals as well," says Villanueva.
Boyd says that in 2009, Mammoth Hospital successfully improved its financial performance, as it was able to achieve a $4.5 million turnaround. He plans to spend more time working on quality reporting in the near future.
