Advocate Health Care Reports $571 Million in Community Benefits

Advocate Condell Medical Center played an integral role in Advocate Health Care’s $571 million contribution in charitable care and services during 2011. This contribution represents more than one million lives touched by Advocate’s healthcare ministry.

“We are proud to have provided charitable care and services that touched more than one million lives last year,” said Jim Skogsbergh, president and CEO of Advocate Health Care. “We continually challenge ourselves to extend our services beyond our hospital walls.”

Advocate provided $95.2 million in free and discounted charity care for the uninsured and underinsured, and more than $295 million in care without full reimbursement from Medicare, Medicaid, and other government-sponsored programs.

In addition to free and subsidized care, Advocate Condell in partnership with Advocate Health offered programs and services that responded to our communities’ unique needs. Some of these programs include: health and wellness education, prostate cancer screening, flu shots, adult day care, and childbirth education classes. Condell also offers a variety of support groups for those with heart and pulmonary disease, diabetes, sleep disorders, cancer, and other conditions.

Advocate also made significant investments in language assistance programs, which offer patients access to interpreters and other non-English patient education materials.  As part of its annual Community Benefits Report, a detailed breakdown of Advocate’s contributions was recently filed with the State.

In total, Illinois hospitals contributed annual community benefits of more than $4.6 billion in programs and services in their 2010-11 fiscal years, according to the sixth annual report issued by the Illinois Hospital Association (IHA). (The report can be seen at: http://tinyurl.com/86hb833.)

Despite the continuing economic downturn and Illinois’ challenging political and fiscal environments, the state’s hospitals contributed not only services and programs to benefit their communities but also billions of dollars in tangible economic benefits as major employers, job creators and purchasers of goods and services. Illinois hospitals pump $75.1 billion into the state’s economy each year, including more than $14.8 billion in salaries and benefits to employ nearly a quarter of a million people. In nearly half of the state’s counties, hospitals are among the top three employers.