Media Release

For: Immediate Release
Date: July 8, 2004
Contact: Bruce Cryan (401) 222-5123

RI Health Department Analyzes the Financial Health of Local Hospitals

Today, the Rhode Island Department of Health (HEALTH) released The Health of RI’s Hospitals (2003) detailing the financial performance of Rhode Island’s 13 community hospitals. The Report also compares the state’s hospitals to those in the Northeast and to others across the country.

Compared to hospitals in other regions, hospitals in Rhode Island: fared poorly on profitability, declined in net worth, and experienced lower liquidity during 2002 (the most recent year for comparable data). RI’s hospitals also financed their facilities with more debt and had less capacity to increase these borrowings compared to other regions.

In 2003, however, the performance of hospitals in Rhode Island improved. Profit margins and net worth increased, and collections improved. Overall borrowings were reduced, and the ability to service this debt was enhanced.

In addition to benchmarking the overall hospital financial performance, the Report also ranked the individual facilities in the state using a composite score of 8 measures over 3 years.
Based on this methodology, the top performing hospitals were Miriam, Bradley and Women & Infants, respectively.

"This report shows that hospitals face a lot of financial stresses and do better some years than others," said Dr. Patricia A. Nolan, Director of Health. "Hospitals are extremely important to the health care system. We monitor their financial performance to assist policymakers in addressing reimbursement and other issues in the hospital sector."

The Report is available on HEALTH’s website (www.HEALTH.ri.gov). Author Bruce Cryan notes that this is only one of many possible analyses using the Hospital Financial Dataset -2003 , containing raw hospital data. The Dataset is also available on the HEALTH website.