HELENA-WEST HELENA — The Helena Hospital plans to restore MRI service soon.
The mobile imaging service didn’t stop because patients stopped needing it; it stopped because the hospital quit paying its two MRI vendors, one of many head-scratching debts the hospital’s previous owner left behind.
But the hospital — now under the control of the Helena Health Foundation — has a plan to finish paying off the $150,000 in unpaid MRI bills and restore imaging services.
It’s a small win for the struggling Phillips County hospital, now on its third owner in two years, as it tries to dig out of a financial mess left behind by previous owner Progressive Health Group of Mississippi.
The local foundation assumed all of the hospital’s debts and has been steadily paying them down. Those debts turned out to be around $6 million, a little more than the foundation initially knew about when it took over the hospital in June, according to hospital leaders.
The financial situation at the hospital was so dire at the end of Progressive’s ownership run this summer that Rex Jones, the current interim CEO, minces no words when considering whether the hospital was at risk of closure before the foundation stepped in.
“It wasn’t ‘at risk’,” he said. “It would have closed.”
If the hospital had closed, the residents of one of Arkansas’ poorest counties would have had to travel 29 miles to Clarksdale, Mississippi, for the closest hospital. The closest options in Arkansas are even farther away in Forrest City and DeWitt.
Helena Hospital, which converted to a federally designated rural emergency hospital in 2023, operates an emergency department and offers lab work, ultrasounds and some limited inpatient admissions.
Today, the hospital is owned by the foundation and works with the Arkansas Rural Health Partnership, a Lake Village-based nonprofit that supports Arkansas health initiatives for rural residents and health care providers. Jones, a veteran of rural hospital leadership, is provided to the hospital by the partnership. He plans to lead the hospital for a few months and help the foundation find a permanent leader.
Jones is confident the hospital will become more financially stable and that it will survive.
“Honestly, I truly believe this place is going to be here,” he said. “It’s going to need some help, but I think it’s going to be viable.”
A year ago, Progressive CEO Quentin Whitwell expressed optimism about the hospital in an interview with Arkansas Business, saying, “We’re right about to the break-even point right now” after years of financial losses at the facility. He did not respond to messages seeking comment for this story.
Hospital Problems
Helena Health Foundation took over ownership of the hospital on June 1 from Progressive, which had only operated the hospital since early 2024. Progressive had taken over the lease on the hospital from Quorum Health Corp.
Progressive bought the contents of the hospital from Quorum for about $2.7 million, and the foundation co-signed on Progressive’s loan.
Progressive, which changed the name of the hospital from Helena Regional Medical Center to Progressive Health of Helena, took over a hospital that had already been struggling. The hospital had lost more than $1 million each year since 2004 and lost $8.57 million in 2022.
But Whitwell seemed confident he could turn things around.
“This won’t be the first hospital that we’ve taken that was losing $8 million a year and made it successful,” Whitwell said last year.
Foundation Chairman Ed Pat Wright suspected Progressive had not turned things around early this year when the company began asking the foundation for help paying its bills. In one case, Progressive wanted $50,000 to pay for radiology services, which it needed to run its ER. Progressive said it needed the money by noon the following day or the radiology service was “going to walk out and we won’t have an ER,” Wright recalled the company saying.
“They kept asking us to pay this, that and the other and we kind of saw the writing on the wall,” Wright said. “I reached out to our local attorney and I said ‘It looks like this may be going south.’”
At that time, Wright said Progressive still believed it would be able to make things work, but, by March, things had not gotten better.
“They came in one day and said: ‘We don’t have the money for payroll. Will y’all make the payroll for us?’” Wright said.
The foundation agreed to fund the payroll but said it would be taking over the hospital. That meant the hospital would assume all of Progressive’s debt related to the facility, including the $2.7 million loan, a $700,000 line of credit and all of the outstanding bills. At closing, those bills looked to be about $2 million, but they turned out to be more like $3 million, Wright said.
“I don’t know what their intentions were, they just never made any attempt, it looks like a lot of time, just to pay the bills,” Wright said of Progressive.
In some cases, Wright thought Progressive’s business plan appeared to be to move on to a new vendor after racking up debts with another, like in the case of the MRI services. In food service, Progressive owed money to Sysco, Performance Food Group and Ben E. Keith. The hospital also didn’t pay its electric bills.
The hospital has a finance committee that looks over bank balances and medical claims each day, and it meets weekly to decide which bills to pay. The hospital is trying to pay its bills through the operational revenue of the hospital, but the old debts are being paid by the Helena Health Foundation.
“It’s a mess,” Wright said.
Too Much Space
Around the time Progressive took over from the previous owner, the hospital switched from being a full medical center to a rural emergency hospital. That designation requires hospitals to eliminate most services, but allows them to keep their emergency services, some outpatient offerings and very limited inpatient services.
In exchange, the hospitals get a monthly payment of about $300,000 from the federal government, which Jones said is necessary for the program to work.
There are 43 rural emergency hospitals in 18 states, including hospitals in DeWitt, Eureka Springs, Osceola and Pocahontas.
Since making the switch, Helena Hospital sees 750 to 800 ER visits a month, which Jones said is good considering the hospital’s size and the community’s population decline.
But the hospital’s new program doesn’t require all of the space of a traditional hospital, and Jones estimates the hospital could get by with about 30% of its current 120,000-SF footprint. Jones said the hospital’s fixed overhead costs are tough to deal with and noted the hospital’s energy bills run about $1,000 a day.
The building also needs roof work with repairs estimated around $750,000 and a replacement estimated around $2 million. Jones said he’s looking into shutting off some utilities to parts of the building, but he is worried about the consequences.
“When you start shutting utilities off, things go bad quickly,” he said.
Changes and struggles at the hospital over the past couple of years have also resulted in a loss of trust with the community. Jones said it’s been a challenge to get residents to recognize the hospital is still there.
Despite the challenges, Wright is confident about the hospital’s future.
“We’re going to make it, and the hospital’s going to be here,” he said.
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