Northern Light Health saw lower financial losses last year
By Kathleen O’Brien, Bangor Daily News Staff
Bangor’s largest health care system saw significantly lower financial losses in 2023 but was still in the red, as hospitals nationwide worked to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Northern Light Health, which runs 10 hospitals and is Penobscot County’s largest private employer, reported earning about $2.16 billion in operating revenue from Sept. 30, 2022, to Sept. 30, 2023, according to an annual report the agency released on Feb. 21. The annual revenue was about $36 million less than the agency’s $2.19 billion in expenses. With other gains, Northern Light’s total deficit totaled roughly $2 million.
Despite the deficit, the health care provider’s 2023 financial totals showed marked improvement from 2022. That’s when Northern Light earned about $2 billion revenue but had about $2.14 billion in expenses, totaling a $178 million deficit with other losses, according to the agency’s 2022 financial report.
Northern Light made a string of changes in 2023 to scale back services to help fight back the steep financial losses it suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those losses came from higher expenses Northern Light took on during the pandemic to create large-scale COVID-19 vaccine clinics, raise wages for staff in a difficult hiring environment and rely on pricey traveling nurses to fill vacancies.
Nationwide, the American Hospital Association estimated hospitals and health systems lost more than $202 billion between March and June 2020 due to lower revenue from canceled elective procedures and the higher cost of caring for people with COVID-19.
Northern Light’s employee total also shrank from just over 12,000 employees in 2023 to roughly 10,560 employees in 2023. That drop likely reflected the 1,400 Northern Light workers who were transferred to Optum, a Minnesota-based health care company, last year.
The shift tasked Optum with handling Northern Light’s behind-the-scenes administrative functions, like scheduling and billing, and contributed to Northern Light saving about $13,000,000 in employee salary and benefit expenses from 2022 to 2023.
The system also completed 404,553 primary care visits in that timeframe — a step up from the 396,333 primary care visits Northern Light saw in 2022. The increase points to a trend of people returning to routine and preventative care appointments after postponing them during the height of the pandemic.