Spencer Fane attorney Donn Herring shared eight tips to prevent a hospital from becoming another hospital closure statistic in an article published in the Missouri Hospital Association’s (MHA) Trustee Matters September issue.
With 53% of Missouri rural hospitals facing increasing and serious financial constraints, Donn shares insight into preventing major threats to operations. In his article, The Rural Hospital Crisis: Eight Tips for Hospital Trustees, Donn outlined steps to preventing closure for rural hospitals, including a focus on understanding the financials, requiring transparency from leadership, creating a culture of sharing success and failure, developing a compliance plan, and counting on the local community for support.
Donn concluded, “Health care (including hospital care) is best when it is local. By taking the steps outlined above, hospital trustees (with CEO buy-in and the help of the local community) can actively work to keep their local hospital alive and thriving.”
Since its creation in 1922, MHA has grown from 50 to more than 140 member hospitals. As a nonprofit membership association, MHA represents every acute care hospital in the state, as well as most of the federal and state hospitals and rehabilitation and psychiatric care facilities.
At Spencer Fane, Donn helps hospitals, physicians, and other health care providers with a full range of business and regulatory issues. He focuses his practice on mergers and acquisitions in the health care industry, which include physician-hospital joint ventures, physician integration, provider network development, HIPAA compliance program development, and voluntary compliance program development.
