www.trusteemag.com/trusteemag_app/hospitalconnect/searc -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 1/11/2005
Last Visited: 3/11/2007
"While nobody likes more rules and regulations, most trustees are welcoming this as a way to avoid a potential problem down the road," says Steven Albertalli, a longtime board member of a 99-bed hospital in Corning, N.Y.A financial glitch that gets by the board, Albertalli says, "could hurt the reputation of the hospital and hurt [a trustee's] own personal reputation."
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"Where you can get into the most trouble is making financial assumptions about things such as funding the [employee] pension," says board member Albertalli, who is retired from a 44-year career with Corning Inc., where he was most recently a vice president and director of investor relations.
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"In a small community like this, we haven't yet found an outside person with hospital experience," says Albertalli."We'll have to back off and pick someone who's a nonboard member who can add more of an auditing background.We probably can't find somebody with a medical accounting background."
The new accountability standards also require extra care in avoiding conflicts of interest on the board.Again, that can be difficult in a small town."We have a limited number of contractors in our community, and we have one person on our board who is the head of a contracting group we have used," Albertalli explains.
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"We've been working with our external auditors to learn what it is they do and what they don't do," says Corning's Albertalli.
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Albertalli's board in Corning has found that learning a newly rigorous oversight role is time-consuming."I think it will end up taking more time," he says.But his board hasn't lost anyone yet to the fear of added fiscal responsibility.