Pitts said if Wellstar had been making such a enterprise resolution for lack of adequate revenues, there’s little the county can do. However, he said, if true, he was deeply involved for the potential lack of jobs and the sufferers that might be unfold throughout metro hospitals which can be already at capability, particularly Grady Memorial Hospital.
“That would have some serious implications for Fulton County and the people that we serve,” Pitts said. “But more than Fulton County it would have implications for Grady, for Piedmont, for Northside, and all of these, because how would we be able to serve the population that they serve if (AMC) were to close?”
In statements this spring relating to the modifications at its facility in East Point, Wellstar officers strongly made the argument that sufferers themselves had chosen different hospitals after they wanted inpatient care, and too many sufferers there didn’t want a full-fledged hospital.
Wellstar is a significant well being system throughout the northwestern a part of the state. It bought AMC and AMC South in 2015 as a part of a bundle of 5 hospitals, from the personal hospital firm Tenet. The monetary prize in that bundle was North Fulton Hospital in Roswell.
Tenet at the moment informed the AJC that “We have a deep respect for WellStar’s commitment to the Atlanta community and its people. We are pleased our people and operations are joining a network with a shared vision to continuously improve health care and invest in its system’s growth.”
Wellstar, like most hospital methods, is a nonprofit group and so is excused from paying taxes due to the expectation it is going to work for the general public good.
Still, nonprofit hospitals work onerous to earn money, and Wellstar makes extra money from its hospitals exterior of downtown.
According to paperwork filed with the state, Wellstar AMC noticed indigent and charity sufferers greater than 50,000 occasions within the newest yr out there, 2020. That’s practically 8,000 greater than Wellstar’s Flagship hospital in Marietta, Wellstar Kennestone, the identical yr. Wellstar put the price of indigent and charity care at $308.6 million for each AMC places.
Both AMC places had been shedding cash: $40 million final yr, in accordance to its most up-to-date posted monetary assertion.
Overall, the system was fairly wholesome, Wellstar informed bond buyers. Wellstar reported earlier this yr that it had $2.8 billion in web property as of September, and sufficient money available to run your entire hospital system for greater than half a yr if mandatory.
Wellstar has confronted criticism that it has disinvested in AMC and in AMC-South.
In April, when Wellstar introduced the closure of the AMC South ER, Wellstar officers said that AMC in Atlanta could be a part of a brand new joint system for Wellstar service in that a part of Fulton County.
Wellstar CEO Candice Saunders informed the AJC in April that in closing the South Fulton ER, Wellstar was really giving sufferers what they wanted, transferring “to consolidate the services from AMC South to AMC main.”
“We’ll be moving the acute care services to Atlanta Medical Center in May. And we do have the capacity there,” Saunders said within the interview this spring. “So those patients who do need the higher level of emergency care, they will be working with EMS and we will get them to the emergency department in one of the surrounding hospitals…we have capacity at Atlanta Medical Center main campus.”
Wellstar officers said that that AMC downtown was averaging 122 ER visits a day, of which 29 offered issues that might not be reversed within the ER and required admission to the hospital.
Atlanta Medical Center began out as an infirmary on the flip of the twentieth century. It grew, turned Georgia Baptist Hospital and in 1921 and 1922 moved from Luckie Street to its current location on Boulevard and what’s now Parkway Drive.
AJC reporters Greg Bluestein and Scott Trubey contributed to this story.
