Georgia lawmakers now require most rural hospital CEOs to take financial management and planning classes

Georgia lawmakers are taking a novel approach to stem the tide of rural hospital closures in the state: They're "requiring executives and board members at almost all the state's rural hospitals to receive training on subjects like financial management and strategic planning to improve their decision making and avoid missteps that can precipitate their hospitals' decline," Sudhin Thanawala reports for The Associated Press. "Nearly 60 rural Georgia hospitals must ensure their board members, CEOs and chief financial officers complete at least eight hours of classes by the end of next year or risk being fined and losing a valuable state tax credit." Health care experts told Thanawala that Georgia is the only state they know of that requires such classes.

Dr. Skip McDannald, now retired, attested to how poor rural hospital management in Georgia can be. Having served as CEO of a hospital system, he was asked to help troubleshoot at Taylor Regional Hospital in Hawkinsville in 2015. "I don't want to run down previous management, but the hospital was struggling," McDannald told Thanawala. "They were not judicious in the way they were spending money nor were they knowledgeable about the things they were not collecting."

"Only about a third of rural hospital CEOs and board chairs surveyed in a 2010 study strongly agreed that their board members understood financial reports or had the ability to spot poor financial performance early," Thanawala reports.

Poor decision-making isn't the only reason rural hospitals close, noted Jimmy Lewis, CEO of rural hospital network HomeTown Health. The seven rural hospitals that have closed in Georgia since 2010 shuttered because "they simply ran out of money, and the system got too complex for small community hospitals like that," Lewis told Thanawala.