Baptist Homes Benevolence History – A Complicated Story Part 4
Early in Dr. Harrison’s tenure, The Baptist Home went through a strategic planning process to explore how to position The Home for future sustainability. This process involved professional consultants, trustees, executive staff, campus personnel, pastors, and MBC leadership. In all, over 60 people participated in the strategic planning process. For our purposes, we will explore two of the decisions from the planning process.
The strategic planning process identified, among other important issues, the need to reduce the cost of benevolent care and reposition The Home to a more stable source of revenue. For the preceding 20 years, The Baptist Home had lost census and thus had revenues that did not cover expenses.
The effort to reduce benevolent costs led to an unforeseen issue. Most of those desiring to live at The Baptist Home did not have the personal resources to cover the cost of their care. Bringing in more residents who only added to the benevolent cost of the ministry would be unsustainable. So, how do we move forward?
A Benevolent Task Force was established to investigate the total impact of benevolence on our ministry. The Benevolent Task Force was comprised of trustees, an executive staff member, an administrator, and several campus staff members. This task force was given the following responsibilities:
- Set benevolence as a part of the overall budget – 10%.
- Track benevolence donations dedicated to the spiritual life of the campuses.
- Eliminate benevolence for assisted living.
- Benevolent ICF residents should be moved to a BHHM CMS-approved campus.
- Develop a Benevolence Committee.
After much prayer and research, Baptist Homes decided to enter the world of Medicare and Medicaid services. Gaining approval to participate in the Medicare and Medicaid services has required a multifaceted approach and the stubbornness of a Missouri mule!
First, acquiring existing Medicare/Medicaid-approved homes would move us into that world very quickly, but at what cost? Second, we learned that none of our legacy campuses (Arcadia Valley, Chillicothe, and Ozark) could be approved in their existing physical condition, since they all had shared bathrooms and current Medicare/Medicaid regulations require private bathrooms.
At some point in the future, we should share this story in greater detail, but for our purposes in this article, I will provide the condensed version. Acquiring existing Medicare/Medicaid campuses could have been a very expensive process were it not for the most difficult healthcare crisis of our era. COVID-19 led to the collapse of hundreds of long-term care facilities across the state of Missouri. We were able to purchase four homes—Smithville, Adrian, and Tri-County—for less than a million dollars. After remodeling and refreshing, these homes added over 200 Medicare/Medicaid-approved licenses to our network.
Additionally, through the stubbornness of our administrator at the Arcadia Valley campus, Dan Stiles, we found a way to be approved for Medicaid at that campus. This process has helped us to understand how to gain that approval for all of our campuses.
In our next issue, we will explore the complicated but necessary road of accepting Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement and a new day and broader ministry opportunity.
Dr. Ron Mackey, Vice President, Community Engagement
