Picking priorities
Mary Stroka
NLJ Reporter
Weston County Health Services will hold off on pursuing — and paying for — a forensic audit until the 2025-26 budget, the board decided at its April 24 meeting.
CEO Cathy Harshbarger said at the meeting that the 2024-25 budget is tight. She explained that she doesn’t want to collect engagement letters from interested contractors when the hospital might postpone the audit for several months.
She previously reported at the March 20 board meeting that each company she inquired with regarding a possible financial audit would ask the hospital to pay in stages, and that the first phase was estimated to cost between $75,000 and $100,000 for most of the companies. The company would conduct interviews, examine documents, analyze finances and data, and create a preliminary report.
Trustee Nathan Ballard, who is on the finance committee and championed the forensic audit, agreed at the April 24 meeting that the hospital should delay paying for a forensic audit in order to prioritize providing for hospital patients. He specifically referenced deferred maintenance work on essential systems that the hospital has, such as the HVAC system and the need for a new CT scanner.
Ballard insisted that the audit is not being cancelled, and is just being delayed because the hospital possesses the data required for a forensic audit, “and that data’s not going anywhere.”
“As far as I’m concerned, we are going to do the forensic audit,” he said. “This is not the right time.”
Ballard told the News Letter Journal that the board’s and the community’s response to the idea of undergoing the audit has inspired him to be even more motivated to pursue the audit, but he believes other work is more urgent.
“There are some new recommendations for improvements with business, billing and clinic that I believe would be such a great advantage to the community, we should not put them off,” he said. “These will be my priority for this fiscal year. Once we have maximized patient and community experience, I am eager to support the launch of this important investigation.”
Trustee Ben Roberts said at the April 24 meeting that the hospital should delay undergoing a financial audit, but agreed with Ballard that the hospital board “can’t let it fall through the cracks.”
While questions remain about past financial activities at the hospital, work on the current financial state of the facility is progressing, according to Ballard.
He told the NLJ on April 27 that he believes the Manor currently has 49 residents. That follows a report from Shane Filipi, the nursing home’s administrator, who told the NLJ in March that the Manor’s population was at 46. Filipi and Ballard have both said that they would like to see the count return to the 50s, a census the hospital hasn’t seen since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Ballard also said the hospital’s inventory system should go live in mid-May, so the hospital should begin billing for supplies at that time, which addresses a significant error discovered in the hospital’s financial framework that was discovered a few months ago.
According to the March finance report – which, as Ballard pointed out, had an inconsistency that needs to be clarified regarding the bank account balance – the hospital continues to “make slow headway on increasing our cash and work on the timeliness of our workflow” as officials monitor facility expenses and discuss them with department leaders.
The report stated that the hospital is also beginning to work with department leaders to verify department profit-and-loss numbers. Employer benefits have been reclassified from the accrual accounts to the expense accounts, and transmission errors in Sage, the hospital’s accounting system, have been corrected by updating the general ledger mapping.
Hospital Happenings
Notes from the April 24, 2025, meeting of the Weston County Health Services Board of Trustees
CEO Cathy Harshbarger told the board that rain and wind earlier in the week blew shingles off the roof, causing some rain damage in the emergency department. The damage occurred in the entryway and also near the area where medications are kept. Harshbarger said she was told that the roof was replaced around 2016 or 2017, and the board authorized her to repair the roof with a budget of up to $25,000, which represents the insurance deductible for roof repair.
Harshbarger told the board that some people have committed to donating yet-to-be-specified amounts toward the purchase of a replacement CT scanner. Trustee Karine Wright-West said she believes the hospital has raised about $75,000 in committed donations toward its $300,000 goal.