Saint Vincent, UMass Memorial had $291M in 2019 profit

Photo | Grant Welker Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester

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By Grant Welker

The coronavirus pandemic has been not only a health challenge to hospitals in Central Massachusetts and beyond, but also a financial one.

Fortunately for the larger Central Massachusetts hospitals, they came into 2020 with healthy financials, according to new fiscal 2019 data released Tuesday by the Massachusetts Center for Health Information and Analysis.

Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, for example, ended last fiscal year with a nearly $74-million net surplus, good for a 14.2% profit margin last year. Worcester-based UMass Memorial Health Care had a $217-million revenue surplus, a 4.6% positive margin.

UMass Memorial's revenue figure comes in large part due to the sale last year of a pharmacy management division for $208 million. That sale has been credited by the hospital system as providing enough cash on hand to avoid layoffs or furloughs despite the budget crunch caused by the pandemic.

Smaller hospitals generally did well, too. Harrington Hospital in Southbridge, which has an agreement to become part of the UMass Memorial system, had a nearly $14-million surplus, as did Milford Regional Medical Center. MetroWest Medical Center, which has campuses in Framingham and Natick, was up $7 million for the year.

A few had losses, including HealthAlliance-Clinton Hospital, with an $8-million loss, Marlborough Hospital, which had a narrow loss of $263,000, and Nashoba Valley Medical Center, with a $557,000 loss. Hospital-affiliated physicians networks, which normally run sizable deficits because of how expenses and revenue are accounted for, did so as well last year, including at UMass Memorial, Saint Vincent and MetroWest Medical Center.

Hospital systems' accounting numbers can include divisions outside of acute care hospitals, such as real estate arms, investments or other care departments.

Hospital's 2019 fiscal years ended either last October or last December.

Statewide, 19 of 24 hospital systems and 48 of 61 acute-care hospitals ran a surplus, according to CHIA. The statewide median acute hospital margin was 3.5%, a 1-percentage-point drop from the prior year. The statewide median acute hospital operating margin was 2.5%, a 0.2-percentage-point decrease from the year before.