BELIZE CITY, Wed. July 28, 2021– This week, the chairman of the board of the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital (KHMH), Dr. Andre Sosa, told local media that the healthcare institution would be looking at ways of improving its revenue collection after financial reports showed that almost 35 million dollars in fees owed to the hospital has not been paid.

Just last month, the KHMH board opted not to renew the contract of three senior managers —effectively firing them, after which a fourth senior manager voluntarily resigned. At the time, Dr. Sosa had alluded to what he called the financial hemorrhaging of the hospital — which he categorized as a crisis.

He said that the board felt that they needed to inject new energy into the KHMH’s management systems in order to achieve the goals of the hospital — goals that will require a considerable amount of financial backing. He pointed out that the unpaid fees, if collected, could be used to carry out much-needed upgrades to the hospital to increase its standards and broaden its range of services. Notably, at the time of the board’s decision to part ways with the three senior managers, Mike Thomas, the KHMH’s financial controller, also voluntarily resigned — becoming, as previously mentioned, the fourth senior manager whose employment at the institution came to an end.

Sosa mentioned that the financial hardships brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in almost 9 million dollars of uncollected medical bills in just the first year of the outbreak.
The board is now looking at increasing its in-house capacity to collect revenue by categorizing patients according to their financial circumstances in order to determine which patients are able to cover their medical bills.

The hospital is also looking at the possibility of selling the 35-million-dollar debt or outsourcing the collection of the monies.