Standard & Poor's has lowered Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center's debt rating from AA- to A+, largely due to the hospital's troubled implementation of its Epic electronic health record system.
The EHR implementation's impact on the hospital's finances and operations was "greater than anticipated and affected overall fiscal performance for fiscal year 2013," said Edward Chadwick, WFBMC's executive vice president for finance and CFO, in a hospital statement.
The downgrade was also due in part to cuts in National Institutes of Health research funding, slowed volume growth, a lower provider tax and sequestration cuts, according to the statement.
However, S&P has changed WFBMC's financial outlook from "negative" to "stable," predicting "operating results to rebound measurably in fiscal 2014 as management's corrective actions demonstrate results and the disruptive effect of the IT rollout diminishes," according to the statement.
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