Morris County Hospital in Council Grove is campaigning for financial help from the community to bring its facility and technology more up to date, as well as to build a scholarship endowment fund.
Caroline VonFeldt, the hospital’s executive director, said the hospital’s campaign for funding started last March. The hospital hopes to raise $1.5 million to $1.7 million from the public to help pay for the improvements; it will pick up the rest of the estimated total cost of more than $3.7 million.
“What really got us started on this campaign was the mandate of Medicare that we had to have (an) electronic filing system in place by the year 2012,” VonFeldt said. “And then they’ve upped it now to 2014.
“We have been updating some of our things anyway prior to that, so we have been adding on to that now and embellish(ing) it.”
The electronic medical record filing system itself will cost about $1.1 million. Other planned improvements include:
- Renovation and expansion of the hospital’s Family Health Center, which the hospital says is necessary because of the addition of a new doctor and increased specialist services.
- A new CT scanner with 16-slice imaging, which provides better data than the hospital’s current single-slice CT scanner.
- A new mammography machine to replace the hospital’s current one, which is 12 years old.
- A PACS system, which will provide hospital officials immediate access to radiology images from any location.
- A new full-time MRI machine, which would replace the mobile machine available to patients on a limited basis only two half-days per week.
- Health education funds and a scholarship endowment fund for students seeking to become health-care professionals.
VonFeldt said that under the scholarship program, students would have to come back to the hospital and work for a couple of years in return for the scholarship money.
“In a rural area, it’s very important to try to keep the young people here,” she said. “And if they have the desire to go into a medical field, it’s nice to be able to help them with some of their scholarship money so that they can finish their schooling and then come back and work.”
James Reagan, Morris County Hospital’s chief executive officer, views the new CT scanner and mammography machine as probably the most important aspects of the desired improvements, along with the expansion of the Family Health Center.
“Because we’re out of exam rooms, basically, and we have physicians falling on top of each other,” he said.
The fundraising campaign is a five-year program, VonFeldt said, meaning that anyone who donates funds can do so in whatever increments they want for five years.
The hospital hopes to be ending its campaign stage in another month or two. VonFeldt said the hospital didn’t want to publicly disclose how much of the $1.5 million goal has been raised, but said the fundraising was progressing nicely.