Shelly Soileau, CFO of Opelousas (La.) General Health System, has been in her new role for just over two months, but with 25 years of healthcare experience under her belt, she's hit the ground running with a major focus on one glaring industry challenge: patient transportation.
"We are rural, so a lot of our community is either without a vehicle, low-income population, elderly population — a lot of comorbidities in some of our areas," Ms. Soileau told Becker's. "Transportation is an issue, and we have missed clinic visits because [patients] don't have a ride to get to the clinic."
While the health system does work to reschedule visits once patients arrive to their appointments, the other issue is getting the patients transported back to their place of residence post-visit.
Ms. Soileau said that Opelousas is looking at avenues like applying for a grant or developing a patient transportation service to ensure they are seen on time.
"It creates challenges," she said. "We constantly try to call them, check in on them, even if it's a resort to a televisit just to check in on them. We're even looking at the potential of patient monitoring with devices at home in order to check their vital signs to make sure everything is okay."
Apart from her focus on transportation, Ms. Soileau is also dedicated to finding solutions for managing rising healthcare costs. Increased labor, supply and technology costs and little to no reimbursement have led to compressed margins for the system.
One way the health system has worked to combat this issue is by aggressively looking at all of its contracts.
"We're going to our vendors to say, 'Times are tough. You have this annual automatic three, four or five percent increase in our contract, but we're not getting any additional increase from our payers. We can't sustain that. So what can you do to help?' That's been a really big push since I've been here and we've made a lot of changes in that area," Ms. Soileau said.
Through renegotiating contract terms or eliminating them, Opelousas has been able to get back to the basics, "trim the fat" where certain services are not necessary and still be able to provide proper care to patients.
Opelousas has also positioned itself well amid industry wide labor shortages, and has been able to cut back to a minimal amount of contract labor agreements, keeping most of its employment local. Ms. Soileau pointed to a strong culture at the health system for employee retention.
"The culture is very rich here with not only a family oriented culture, but embracing the community as well," she said. We do a lot of functions and fundraisers within the community. It's just a close knit community, so it permeates through the organization. Our employees want to work here; they are proud of working for OGH."
Looking toward the future, Ms. Soileau said the health system is looking into telemedicine partnerships with other rural areas to ensure patients have the opportunity to see specialists through televisits.
Opelousas is also hoping to kick off a residency program with around five students in 2025, with a goal of bringing more employment opportunities and increased reimbursement to the health system.
"We're hoping to be able to do the spring matches for 2025, and that's primarily with psychiatry," she said. "It's going to mean that we can service more patients, because with the psychiatry piece, we'll be able to enhance our psychiatric unit."