Op-Ed: The NVRH Budget Season is Upon Us

NVRH CEO Shawn Tester shares the responsible budget approach taken by your community

ST. JOHNSBURY, VT (August 12, 2024) – Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital (NVRH) is your local community hospital. We are committed to ensuring access to the primary, specialty, and critical healthcare services that you need in your own backyard—all in service of our mission, “Committed to improving the health and wellbeing of all.”

The recent tragic flooding that has impacted our region, both in the last month, as well as last year, highlights just how important local access to care is. We understand this, which is why we are committed to improving health, not just within the walls of our hospital, but also throughout our community.

This is an exciting time for local care. We are expanding our Emergency Department, Laboratory, and internal Pharmacy to give you the best care possible, and to ensure an overall excellent patient experience. This project, which we call the West Wing Expansion, will be one of the largest improvements in NVRH’s 52 years in existence. We appreciate the many donors who are helping make this effort come to fruition.

Like many local businesses, we also struggle with workforce issues, which is why we created our Career Advancement Program. We are training and developing our own local nursing workforce to address this need, helping people advance their careers while addressing our workforce needs. Additionally, we are committed to investing in the local workforce pipeline, bringing in dozens of high school students, health profession students, and adult learners to experience various health careers with the hope that they pursue one and work right here in the Kingdom.

Every year, the team at NVRH builds a budget and submits it to Vermont’s healthcare regulator, the Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB), for review and approval. We attempt to balance inflationary cost pressures while ensuring continued access to quality care. While the current economic environment makes this year particularly challenging, I am proud of the work our team has done to balance the priorities of financial sustainability with improved access.

NVRH’s Proposed Fiscal Year 2025 Budget

In preparation for this year’s hospital budget process, and amidst Vermonters’ growing concern around affordable and accessible healthcare, we are sharing our hospital’s proposed budget with our community. For fiscal year 2025, we are proposing a 3.9% increase in what is called “net patient revenue” (which basically means what we “earn” after taking the overall cost for providing care and subtracting our costs) and a commercial rate request of 4.5%. As mentioned previously, NVRH takes a collective budgeting strategy, and is only requesting increases that will yield a very small 0.7% operating margin. This budget increase request—which is essentially breakeven—will ensure that NVRH has stability and can continue to invest in our community’s health and growing our healthcare workforce to meet the needs of our rural and aging population. It also acknowledges that a lot of us are struggling with high costs right now and we want to reduce our impacts on those costs for you and your family.

 At the August 26 budget hearing before the Green Mountain Care Board, we will present and support the critical budget that we need to ensure we have the resources to accomplish our workforce goals, community health improvement work, and to serve you, our neighbors and friends. As always, thank you for supporting your community hospital.