SEQUIM — This will be a year of stabilization and progress for Olympic Medical Center after a difficult 2023 and the post-pandemic financial crisis that impacted health systems across the state and country, CEO Darryl Wolfe told Sequim Sunrise Rotary.
“In 2024, we are budgeting for the first time ever a negative margin,” Wolfe said Friday. “It’s only reasonable you don’t go from a negative 10 percent margin in 2023 to winning in 2024. It’s a step forward, believe it or not.”
Olympic Medical Center’s board of commissioners will return to in-person meetings when they conduct their first meeting of 2024 at 6 p.m. today. The meeting, at which new officers will be chosen, will be in the Linkletter Hall in the basement of the hospital at 939 Caroline St. in Port Angeles. Meetings also can be watched online at tinyurl.com/j38rstht.
Wolfe said Friday that OMC anticipated losing $750,000 over the next 12 months while continuing to curb expenses, implementing strategies to boost revenue and bolstering its workforce.
The meeting was held on Zoom due to the winter weather conditions that hit the North Olympic Peninsula last week.
Wolfe said the pandemic aggravated a number of OMC’s existing challenges, particularly hiring and retaining employees.
“It just it seemed to accelerate by five to 10 years in terms of shortages, for not just nurses but physicians, physical therapists, IT people,” Wolfe said.
OMC had to find ways to recruit talented people when it couldn’t match other employers in terms of salary and bonuses, he said.
“We live in a beautiful part of the world and I think we have a lot to offer, but we’re not the richest place,” Wolfe said. “We don’t have an endless bucket of money for workforce, but we do think we have something special and we want to make sure that we’re selling that.”
Among the new hires were two urologists who will start this summer and help rebuild a speciality that had been reduced by retirements, Wolfe said.
In addition to cost-cutting measures such as restricting overtime, monitoring purchases of equipment and office supplies and reducing its reliance on contract labor, OMC had been sharply focused on making its medical record keeping and billing more efficient in order to optimize revenue.
“We get paid on what a doctor or nurse puts in a medical record, and you need to be sure you’re documenting what’s going on with the patient accurately,” Wolfe said.
This was a not about charging people for unnecessary services, he said, but following good practices that had the potential to realize millions of dollars over the year.
“We just want to get paid for what we’re doing,” he said.
OMC would also see an improvement in Medicaid reimbursements in 2024 that would mean between $10 million and $12 million.
“That is huge for us,” Wolfe said.
Despite OMC’s straitened financial position, Wolfe said it had not laid people off or cut wages.
“We’re continuing to invest in the workforce that we have because the only way out of this is with them,” he said. “You know, we’ve had spirited debates over the last 18 months about who do we lay off, what services do we close, but we haven’t done it.”
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Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached at paula.hunt@peninsuladailynews.com.
