This article is about a panel at Health Journalism 2008.
Instructors:
• Gita B. Budd, principal, ECG Management Consultants
• Karl Stark, pharmaceutical reporter, The Philadelphia Inquirer
By Sandra Jordan
of the St. Louis American
AHCJ may have saved one of the best sessions for last as an award-winning health journalist and a health industry consultant presented "Ripping the Cover off Hospital Finances."
Karl Stark, pharmaceuticals reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Gita B. Budd, principal of ECG Management Consultants, provided attendees with a good mix of user-friendly information from about hospital finances from both sides of the writer's pen.
Stark said there are five key documents on hospital finance:
- Audited Financial Statements
- Current bond rating reports
- Bond prospectuses
- IRS 990 forms
- Medicare cost reports
The tutorial included a detailed handout explanation about what each type of document contains and equally important, how to obtain it, key line items to examine and what they indicate. Stark said to consider information in each document as a lead in your overall story.
Some health systems put audited financial statements on their Web sites. In the handout, Stark called this document "the gold standard for determining a hospital's overall finances." He said get them, complete with supplemental schedules. He told reporters not to accept the glossy, PR-reads that may be presented to them.
"The hospital has to give you their audited financial statement if you ask for it," Stark said. Audited financial statements measure liquidity, solvency and profitability.
Stark also cautioned about printing figures without speaking to the hospital first to understand the story behind it.
"Never write a story where you just put a number from a document or a report without talking to them first," Stark said.
Budd said the statement a hospital never wants to hear is, "I want to speak to your chief financial officer," because they are rarely media-trained.
For those writers who may be "fuzzy" when it comes to math and finances, Stark offered suggestions to help in the translation: a university health policy center, the chief financial officer where you work and health lawyers.
He said rating agencies will typically give the most recent bond ratings for hospitals to journalists free of charge. Try Christopher Mortell at Standard & Poors at 212-438-3446 or christoper_mortell@standardandpoors.com.
To obtain bond prospectuses, visit two Web sites, www.munios.com and www.dacbond.com.
IRS Form 990s are filed by nonprofits and are available for downloading after a free sign-up at www.guidestar.org or may be obtained from the hospital directly.
On Medicare cost reports, they suggest reviewing Schedules A-8-1 (payments to businesses owned by hospital leaders), A-8-2 (physician payments as a group and whether Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services agrees it is reasonable) and Schedule G (finance detail).
Sources for Medicare reports include the hospital, CMS or firms that collect the data, including American Hospital Directory, "Profiles of U.S. Hospitals" by Solucient and "State of the Hospital Industry" by Cleverely & Associates.
Reporters also received three pages of hospital finance story ideas which included the web address to a good document to learn more about hospital finances: A Community Leader's Guide to Hospital Finance, overseen by Harvard public health professor Nancy Kane.
