Wyoming Medical Center will administer an easier application process for charity care patients, according to chief financial officer Nancy Brandt.

Brandt and chief executive officer Vickie Diamond presented the new application to the Natrona County Board of Commissioners during a work session Thursday.

Of about $30 million in uncompensated care each fiscal year, Brandt said, about 20 percent is from charity care patients and 80 percent is from "bad debt" patients.

Charity care happens when a person applies and the hospital determines that the person is unable to pay his or her bill, while bad debt occurs when a person simply does not pay his or her bill for whatever reason.

Nationally, the split between charity care and bad debt patients is about 50 percent, Brandt said.

"We really want to go back and make sure that we're treating all of our patients in the most fair and equitable way we can and being a good community partner and categorizing them appropriately," she said. "So for people who are truly needy, we wanted to have a policy that would allow them forgiveness on their debt related to their medical bill."

The old charity care application, Brandt said, was lengthy, five-page long process that took about an hour to complete and didn't provide information that was particularly helpful in making the charity care qualification determination.

"This policy won't change the financial implication to Wyoming Medical Center," Brandt said. "The $30 million we spend every year won't change. What will change is how those patients' charges are classified."

Working with Healthcare Financial Management Association, a charity care policy development firm, the medical center chose a new version of the application based on federal guidelines and comparability to other hospitals nationally.

"We also wanted to take out the pieces of the policy where it felt like we may be judging a patient," Brandt said. "We wanted to eliminated that and base it just on the facts related specifically to their tax forms, then to pay stubs and things that can be verified by documentation."

The new application is one page long and will take about five minutes to complete, Brandt said.

Based on a sliding scale, the improved charity care policy will allow patients at 200 percent or less of the poverty guideline - known as the "medically indigent" - to apply for complete coverage of their medical bills. The scale also allows patients up to 275 percent of poverty level coverage for a percentage of bills.

"We still expect people who might qualify for Medicare or Medicaid to do that application process. We still expect people who have insurance to show us that and use that insurance, and we still expect people who have an ability to pay to pay," Brandt said.

Due to the federal government's recent concentration on proving the viability of nonprofit organizations, Diamond said, the new charity care application will allow for better categorization of uncompensated funds and will help the medical center prove its nonprofit status.

"The old system makes it difficult for the community," she said. "If they can't pay or they can only partially pay, this benefits them."

The charity care committee will take the application to the medical center board for review on June 19, and the commission will vote on the application during its next regular public meeting on July 1.

Contact reporter Megan Lee at (307) 266-0589 or megan.lee@trib.com