Use existing resources to find revenue, meet community need

Although hospitals used to conduct an annual community needs assessment to simply gauge how many specialists they needed, hospitals must now meet government requirements to not only complete community needs assessments but also create specific action plans, according to Kevin L. Shrake, a former hospital CEO and a fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives.

Doing so not only improves the health of the community, particularly related to drug addiction, but also can help hospitals' bottom line, Shrake wrote in Hospital Impact this week. For instance, a Midwest 100-bed facility instituted an intensive three-day inpatient medical stabilization program, leveraging existing empty beds. With an exclusive agreement with another facility, they carefully screened patients with DRG numbers related to alcohol and drug dependency and created a service line that generated $800,000 of annual revenue with a 40 percent profit margin. --Read the full blog post on Hospital Impact