Hospital's health is of importance to all Columbus

The venerable Columbus health care institution that is St. Francis Hospital appears to have reached at last a place of stability and healing after more than a year of turmoil and sickness. This should come as a relief not just to all directly concerned with the 65-year-old medical facility itself, but to the whole community.

As had been expected for months, Tennessee-based LifePoint Health officially confirmed Monday morning that is acquiring the formerly non-profit hospital to be operated going forward as a for-profit facility. David Koontz, who has been LifePoint's transition executive for the St. Francis purchase since September, will be the hospital's new CEO.

LifePoint, known to be a prospective and increasingly likely buyer since mid-2015, will pay off some $240 million in debt, most of that a loan from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to finance a major 2013 expansion, and will settle all the hospital's other accounts payable.

This development is a positive one on a number of levels. It allows medical and support staff and other hospital workers to move forward at last from problems they had no part in creating, but which nonetheless cost more than 60 St. Francis employees their jobs. (LifePoint has offered continued employment to all active hospital staffers, subject to standard pre-employment screenings.) Also, the for-profit operation of the hospital should have a substantial positive impact on the city's tax base.

Those accounting and managerial problems have plagued St. Francis at least since mid-2014 -- and, as that was only when the fiscal discrepancies came to light, almost certainly longer. Initial questions about the hospital's fiscal health were dismissed as "an agenda to smear our good name" by then-CEO Robert Granger, who added that hospital officials would continue to "enjoy the high road" where "the view is much better."

But in November 2014 the administration acknowledged a $30 million deficit it called an "accounting inaccuracy." Chief Financial Officer Matt Moore was dismissed, and Granger resigned in March 2015.

The hospital's woes hardly ended there. A HUD audit report last September concluded that St. Francis had "submitted inaccurate financial information, improperly disbursed mortgage proceeds, incurred an unauthorized liability, and subjected mortgage funds to bank sweeps [moving funds between accounts]." Two previous suitors ended negotiations to purchase the hospital; the second, Community Health Systems (also based in Tennessee), filed a $5 million federal lawsuit alleging St. Francis "has intentionally hidden and lied about material facts regarding the hospital's problems." As of early Monday, that suit apparently had not been dropped or resolved.

We share the hospital board's confidence that LifePoint has fixed, or will fix, St. Francis Hospital's problems of accounting. Accountability -- for how and why those problems got so out of hand in the first place -- is another matter, involving still unanswered, though we hope not unasked, questions.

This story was originally published January 4, 2016 at 5:25 PM with the headline "Hospital's health is of importance to all Columbus."