Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital board approves fee increase

ALBANY — Officials at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital released on Wednesday the budget recommendations for Fiscal Year 2016, which includes a fee increase for inpatient charges, upon the budget’s approval by the hospital’s board.

Effective Sept. 1, the health system is implementing fee increase, which officials say is in line with the annual Consumer Price Index (CPI) for hospital and related services. Health system officials said they will continue to evaluate future fee increases above the index that could support market-based compensation increases for staff members who have not received a merit increase in over three years.

Phoebe officials said an across-the-board analysis was done on charges, which will result in an overall average fee increase of 4.2 percent.

Phoebe officials said the hospital has not instituted an overall free increase since Fiscal year 2010 during which time the annual CPI increase has averaged 5.1 percent.

The budget shows 4,200 full-time jobs in the Phoebe Putney Health System. Capital expenditures includes improvements in technology, equipment and facilities totaling $48 million, and about $20 million of that is for the new electronic medical record system, Meditech, set to go live Oct. 1.

A total investment of $50 million is being put into Meditech, implemented as part of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, officials at Phoebe said. The mandatory implementation of procedure code software is a $1.2 million investment.

Higher drug costs is a key factor in raising fees, Phoebe officials said. The Food and Drug Administration is requiring older medications to go through new approval processes, and FDA actions on manufacturers are forcing many generic items to go to a single source while relatively new drugs have increased prices due to less use than initially anticipated by the manufacturer.

For example, a drug that regulates retention of water known as Vasopressin has gone from $2.25 to $85.64 — a price increase of 3,806 percent. Flucytosine, a generic drug to control allergies, now costs $102.95 as opposed to the $35.57 it cost last year.

Phil Barfield, pharmacy manager at Phoebe, said that just medications alone can account for $3 million of the hospital budget for the year.