The finances of Southwest Health System in Montezuma County have been on something of a roller-coaster ride.
CEO Joe Theine gave a report on the condition of SHS and Cortez’s Southwest Memorial Hospital on Monday at the county commissioners’ workshop.
He said that SHS finished 2024 with $1.7 million in operating income and figures for 2025 should wind up in the $1.5 million range.
That follows losses in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
But 2026 did not start out well. Theine said officials planned for modest growth, but instead the hospital saw a loss of a million dollars for January and February.
“We planned for a half-a-million-dollar operating gain for the whole year and we lost twice that in the first two months,” Theine said. “That’s not a sustainable path.”
However, in March the hospital was much busier, with an increase in patient volume.
For hospitals, the problem is that many costs required just to keep the facility operating are fixed, while revenue is variable.
“If we were to have continue to see another month like January or the first part of February, we would probably have to make changes sometime this year in services that we offer,” Theine said. “We wouldn’t be able to sustain that, a million-dollar loss over the course of two months.”
However, he said he is hopeful that things have turned around.
“Fortunately, the way March is shaping up we don’t think that will be the case, but we’re watching things closely.”
The hospital continues to be in a good position regarding cash, Theine said, finishing March with 109 days of cash on hand, far more than the 60 days it is required to have.
Theine said some good things have been happening with SHS. Officials have has been working to increase the number of people who have a primary care provider with SHS, and “we now have more patients attributed to our PCP providers than we did two years ago,” he said.
In 2025, SHS’s clinic in Mancos, which used to operate just four days a week, was opened on Fridays as well and it has been seeing more visits from patients, Theine said.
The emergency department at Southwest Memorial is busy but accessible, he said. The rate of people who come to the ER but leave without being seen meets the national standard of less than 2 percent.
The average “door to physician” time at the ER is under 10 minutes, Theine said.
And while the hospital will never be able to treat everyone who comes in, because some people need to be transferred for specialized care, Theine said providers are expanding what they can do on the inpatient side.
SHS is also growing its oncology program and working to identify local patients who won’t have to travel back and forth to Durango or elsewhere for treatment.
However, looming over SHS are the long-term impacts of Congress’s passage of HR 1, the so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
Theine said predictions by the nonprofit Advisory Board, which provided pro bono services to SHS to identify the effects of the bill, are that Southwest Memorial would lose nearly $10 million in operating income annually by 2033 because of changes brought about by HR 1.
“If all that were to come to fruition over time, that would leave us with about an $.8.2 million operating loss annually, which obviously is something we can’t sustain,” Theine told the commissioners.
Theine said SHS is working “to see how much we can grow, to see if we can outpace those losses by providing more services where revenue exceeds the cost, and not do more things where costs exceed the revenue.”
Commissioner Kent Lindsay thanked Theine and SHS for joining with the Montezuma County Public Health Department to host a community health fair Saturday, April 18, from 8 a.m. to noon at the Montezuma County Annex, 107 N. Chestnut St.
At the commissioners’ regular meeting on Tuesday, county public health director Bobbi Lock said the fair will offer low-cost lab work including PSAs for men for $20 and other work such as chemistry panels for $35, the most expensive item. Immunizations will be offered for free.
Insurance can’t be billed for health fairs, she said, so people will have to pay out of pocket.
People can pre-register online to avoid waiting in long lines, she said.
