Cook County Health (CCH) Focus of Cook County Board Mid-year Budget Review

Cook County Board of Commissioners - Finance Committee Meeting
Mid-year Budget Review - July 17, 2019 

What did the Board decide?
Several commissioners requested follow up numbers from Cook County Health (CCH) on a number of issues.

Other Discussion:
Debra Carey (in the absence of Dr. Shannon, CCH CEO) presented the review of the budget and stated there is a projected shortage of $103M this year.  She said they expect to be able to eliminate the deficit. They just received a payment of $77M from Medicaid for County Care and the rest they hope to cover by budget tightening and not filling open positions. Charity care is up for the first time since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This was blamed on a problem in Springfield because there is a backlog of eligibility determination and Medicaid is down 7%. The state is addressing this but it will take time.
It seems that coding and documentation is a big issue both for collecting revenue and the outside coding agencies are the delayed accounts payable cited by OIG. There was a lot of discussion on how this is being addressed.

Additional observations:
Commissioner Tobolski asked if there is a structural deficit for the hospital and wants CCH to pay more attention to the business aspect. ​

Observer - Lisa Slankard           Observed for 1 hour