Medicaid cuts to take toll on Cincinnati Children’s Hospital’s budget

Looming cuts to low-income healthcare assistance program Medicaid are creating budgeting challenges for administrators at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

The hospital’s $1.7 billion budget will remain flat this year and Cincinnati Children’s plan to keep its employee count steady at around 12,650 workers, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. Cincinnati Children’s budget will stay flat despite an expected 5 percent increase in demand for medical services.

The hospital is expecting to face $55 million in losses from Ohio Medicaid cuts this year and next. Medicaid patients account for about 45 percent of the hospital’s revenue.

To cope with the funding challenges, Cincinnati Children’s is exploring a couple different avenues. One option is making greater use of the hospital on weekends, and steering some patients toward weekend appointments. “There’s a lot of capacity still left in our system during those times,” Frederick Ryckman, the hospital’s senior vice president of medical operations, told the Enquirer.

However, the bulk of the reduced spending is expected to come from a “capacity management” program that aims to more closely align the supply of Cincinnati Children’s workers with the demand from patients for their services. That involves the hospital getting better at predicting when patients will be discharged and transferred and when they will have elective surgeries, for example.

Additionally, the hospital has implemented a software program that, for example, can look at the last four Mondays during a particular time of year to schedule staff for future Mondays, according to the Enquirer.

Cincinnati Children’s ranked No. 3 nationally in U.S. News & World Report’s most recent list of the top children’s hospitals in the nation.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s most recent two-year budget called for $478 million in reduced Medicaid payments to hospitals.

[Photo by flickr user James Bowe]