Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community This week brings us to another start-up of school districts across the region, another MCHF Fundraising Golf Tournament, and a continued August normal heat index. Summers always seem to move faster than other seasons but thank goodness we do get to see changes from one to the other – a welcome one in the near future. It is good to hear that our golf tournament reached a sold-out verdict several days ago, so I thank Stacy for her always impressive management of this event. And thanks to all of you who have volunteered to make this an annual favorite for many golfers. I’d like to comment just briefly on our new registration software: Phreesia. For the most part it has rolled out equal to or exceeding the expectation of satisfying the users. But I am very sensitive to the frustrations it has also caused several patients, who experienced longer than normal check-in times. I want our unsatisfied participants to know that Phreesia has been quite responsive to your complaints and has rewritten logic to deal positively with several of the originally built workflows. It was a better product for delivering week two results from week one results, with average check-in times dropping from six minutes to just over four minutes. And those folks who completed the preregistration opportunity on-line, the actual window time in our lobby was under 30 seconds! Our staff is intent on altering the process, based on feedback, to optimize this service for everyone’s satisfaction. Do keep the comments and concerns coming. I close this week with good news on our CFO search effort. Robert Mille has accepted the position and will be starting on site on 9-21-2026. He will be attending the NRHA annual RCH/CAH symposium in Kansas City the week before, on our behalf. It looks like two new leadership faces will soon be seen within days of each other: Eryka for Kevin K. and Robert for Ron. We certainly thank Kevin and Ron for all they have given to MCH! Do have a great next two weeks and do extend your best care to our patients. -Kevin Leeper, CEO

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community The aroma of oil was quite evident this past couple weeks, with the resurfacing of Main Street, followed by our own parking lot. Nice to have both nearly finished with a tidy new look (and the smell evaporating some). It feels a bit like we are preparing, along with the school board, for the return of fall and the substantial uptick in traffic following the doldrums of summer. Summer did not yield a slowdown for MCH, as we have rattled off a couple more very consistent months of activity, which is a good thing! The lengthy build of Phreesia software, to assist our patients in their registration and payment functions, was at last rolled out with a Go-Live this week. Early feedback from both patients and staff has been quite upbeat, and even Phreesia leadership was impressed with the results of the first three days. So, CG appears to be a bit more tech savvy than several of us anticipated (relative to patient’s embracing the software)!! Thank you, customers! Chelsea Wildeman saw her first patients in Herington this week…so congrats to our newest provider, and we wish her the best in attracting patients to our new clinic there! We anticipate an accreditation survey at that location anytime over the next 6-8 weeks, which will officially convert its operation to that of a hospital based rural health clinic. I announced yesterday the offer and acceptance of our new CNO, Eryka Paige, who will be joining us in early September! We were blessed with multiple good candidates, and it is really nice to bring back a local gal to her hometown hospital! The CFO search has also yielded a handful of good interviews, but we have a little more time to land on the best decision. Do have a great next two weeks and do extend your best care to our patients. -Kevin Leeper, CEO

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community As midsummer is suddenly behind us, I hope most of you have experienced or soon to experience that long awaited summer vacation. It’s hard to believe that fall semester football practices will soon be teasing our young folks with heat stroke and body aches. But there still is time for another lake or beach trip, so book it if you can. We’ll certainly remember this as a green summer of never-ending lawn mowing. Coming here from Texas, however, the green does beat the brown alternative – usually starting well before mid-July. The green does look good on Council Grove, and we want that as we are attracting candidates for CFO, CNO, and FP/OB positions. We have booked dates for some of these interviews and hope other dates are secured in the near future. Some of you may not yet know that Kevin Kepley is leaving us in the near future in order to attend his ailing father at his southeastern Kansas farm. And Ron has announced his retirement after serving MCH for nearly twenty years. Both have brought us much from their previous experiences and will be greatly missed. Be sure to join us and say farewell to Kevin next Thursday evening between 4:00 and 6:00PM in the east hallway by the vending machines! Our week-to-week routines at MCH have stayed rather consistent all summer and we are grateful for our patients keeping our workloads steady! The RHTP grants are coming close to bearing the fruits that we have been hoping and working towards, and I thank the many of you that have put in the extra effort to bring us those results! MCH will be better for it and we will be able to pass good things on to our customers. Other than that, the news for this week was in passing another clean Audit for our 2025 fiscal year! We wish our 4Hers a great Morris County Fair week and I encourage you to go see their labors of love and enjoy the event. Do have a great next two weeks and do extend your best care to our patients. -Kevin Leeper, CEO

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community America 250…Quite the ring to it, huh? We must stay proud of it so that its preservation is secure for the next two and a half centuries! Its stature as the best country in the world is undeniable to most of us in the States, but its vulnerability still feels quite real. The next ten years will reveal a lot…let’s aspire for and work towards nothing changing the great things about our Country!! (Forgive me – it just feels like the right time for a little patriotic commentary). As for the world we live in…MCH has covered another payroll…not to indicate that as newsworthy…but because our month-in-month-out world seems to hover around a fairly predictable and routine pattern. Despite a lot of cluttering in the air around rev cycle woes, price fluctuations, supply chain and labor pool volatility, not to mention shifts and swings on the regulatory front, MCH has been steady in creating $3 million to $3.3 million dollar months of patient activity for the most of 30 consecutive months. We have manifested a rhythm which is somewhat comfortable, yet somewhat tenuous because of all the aforementioned clutter. Where we go from here will be dependent on the same rigorous aspirations and deliberate workflows that we have been giving up to this point, for the next 30 plus months. In this summer of some very interesting new expected deliverables: some lucrative grant funding, invigorated networking amongst hospitals formerly considered to be competitors, implementation of AI tools and emerging technologies, new payment rules for EMS, and new rules for our State’s Provider Tax Program, we find ourselves in a holding pattern mid-way through summer, awaiting the actual execution of these many, mostly positive changes. Coming from Missouri, I always believed through seeing vs. the belief-from-hearing approach. Therefore, I will refrain from feeling much added comfort until the “new monies” are in our bank. Once there I will more thoroughly give you their full explanations. Wish things fared better for our true grit USA soccer team. The win or go home model seems to be the true barometer for most sport’s playoff structures. But it forces me to think that the USA’s few victories did matter and that our country did rise to the occasion of putting on a great show for what amounts to the rest of the world’s favorite sport. And those foreigners visiting our lands did get to see for themselves that our Country and our people are not who they may have expected us to be. I’ll just close with one more shout out to America 250! Do have a great next two weeks! -Kevin Leeper, CEO

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community So…you will find two two-week periods of activity below…and I thank you for the extended vacation that caused this carry over. The numbers reflect a softening summer spell, but not too bad of a dip. Any pay period with a Holiday included will result in a prorated volume of budgeted outpatient activity. Therefore, we are not too alarmed by the higher percentage of red values. The good news is that there are looming grant dollars (i.e. Federal subsidies) staring at us through the RHTP rural relief programs, and finally through the Medicaid enhanced payment program which was just approved by CMS this week! This program has been referred to in previous newsletters as the Kansas Provider Tax program, which was requested through our State leaders and Jerry Moran to be elevated to levels executed in other states. This program brings in substantially higher Medicaid reimbursements than we typically realize. It doesn’t come without a price, as we will now have to pay in to a statewide Provider Tax Pool, which in turn gets matched by Federal dollars. It feels as though the cash flow might start out a bit in the wrong direction for us, but the yearlong gain will be a very nice revenue pick up…and the legislation was approved for a ten-year cycle. I do not have much news to report on our victorious grant award, as Stormont Vail is still vetting the grant funding rules prior to ordering the telehealth equipment and specialty physician call availability, which will be funded on our behalf. This is the time of year that 2025 data is fully disclosed to Auditors, National Associations, and Insurance Companies awaiting renewal quotes for the next year. An interesting figure has emerged through these inquiries that I had not yet identified, which should feel good for our entire staff. Post Covid (2022), MCH has experienced a slightly shrinking employee turnover rate, maybe three to four percent a year. But through 2025 from 2024, our turnover rate went from 16.3% - pretty good in its own right – to 9.2% (a 40% decline). Hoping this doesn’t jynx anything, I want to say how great it feels to know that our employees appear to like where they work!! Satisfied team members are the most important reason for MCH performing well in these challenging times. So, I thank you all for your commitment to MCH!! Do have a great next two weeks! -Kevin Leeper, CEO

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community This year is suddenly creeping towards its midpoint. And as such I can truly attest to it being the most interesting of times: 1.) AI is accelerating its influence on healthcare at near undiscernible speed, 2.) an aligned charge to disruptively innovate how healthcare operates is being cast out from Washington DC (and Topeka) at decibels higher than ever heard before, 3.) the RHTP funding opportunities for rural healthcare have at last been defined for release, perhaps in the nick of time, to hopefully respond to the inescapable infiltration of AI and government mandates, and lastly, 4.) as the 21st century consumer more commonly expects their needs for appointments and services to be on their terms, we again see an emergence of primary care alternatives competing with the more conventional pathways that we deliver. All of this on top of the routine stresses of growing business commensurate with the continually growing cost side of operations - whoever said inflation ever got down as low as 2.5 to 3.0% (government hired economists, that’s who)? I apologize for this issue’s late release. I had the privilege of attending KHA’s Annual Board retreat last week, in which we heard from several prominent speakers on how Kansas healthcare is in a state of flux, as mentioned earlier, and just how we need to best plan for the imminent changes. As a member of the product and services Review Committee, we were specifically charged, by the KHA Board, with identifying and making available the very best and most likely to succeed AI companies, of which hundreds are emerging. This will be no small task but one in which there is a high level of commitment to deliver. Many hospitals have already engaged AI partners, so there are track records already getting celebrated and others getting buried. The other news release of late last week was the announcement of the first few rounds of RHTP grant awardees. As expected, there was a considerable effort to spread monies out so that most applicants were awarded something, and few hospitals had more than one award. Hence, of the four grants on which MCH was included, it was only our largest valued one that we walked away with! The Stormont Vail entry was fully funded at $5.5 million, the second largest grant awarded!! As there are only four rural hospitals in this first year’s group of participants, I am extremely excited about how this money can be used to support MCH! The capital component in Telehealth equipment and physician access support already earmarks over $1 million for MCH alone…much more on that in future news releases! It was disappointing that our capital improvement grant of converting our EMS barn into a Senior Solutions Center was not approved, but some grant writing lessons WERE garnered, and Year 2’s opportunity is not far away. We definitely received our highest preferred option. I have run into another funding option that might pave the way into our Geropsyche / Second OR Room / Expanded Cardiac Rehab capital project. More on that funding option if it gains the expected traction over the next few weeks. And lastly, we have had or are scheduling initial interviews with three new 2nd year resident FP/OBs! Our new recruiters are paying dividends. My customary encouragement applies with this letter: please keep our patients’ needs and expectations foremost in your daily work thoughts, and I do thank you for holding onto that mindset. Have a great next two weeks! -Kevin Leeper, CEO

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community We are celebrating Hospital Week this week, and it has been fun to see many of you letting your hair down and joining in on the “Dress the Decade Day”, as each progressive day has moved us through the fifties to the nineties. A shout out to the Team Building Committee, who once again brainstormed a new theme, new treats, and new ways of recognizing each of you for being stellar partners in what we strive to do each day: serve our patients in a TOP TIER manner! Thanks to each of you for persevering through sometimes hectic and stressful times and also for taking on side duties when times are a little bit on the tamer side. Catch up work is always waiting for us in healthcare. I hope you all feel appreciated…that is easier done when you stay tuned into appreciating others! The work we do simply can’t be done without the whole team working as one. I alert everyone – and we just found out about this on Wednesday – that we will have an outside surveyor visit us late morning on Monday, the 18th. Her name is Megan Martin, from Sunflower Health Plan, which is one of the three Managed Medicaid Contractors for the State of Kansas. She will want to know that we know our emergency preparedness / fire plans, that we practice effective infection control techniques, that we inform our patients of their rights. This will be an abbreviated version of the conventional State Survey, but very important that we do well, or we could lose the privilege of treating the Sunflower beneficiaries or policy holders. So, my alert of two weeks ago has quickly come to fruition. Please tidy things up around your area as best as you can between now and then! And do know where your policy books are located or where to find them on HealthDocs. I want to close with a Big Congratulations to all of you who are home to or related to a 2026 Graduate. It is milestone moment for so many at this time of year, and we can hope that some of these graduates get drawn into a healthcare career! Enjoy your celebrations with them. The same encouragement applies with this letter: please keep our patient’s needs and expectations foremost in your daily work thoughts, and I do thank you for holding onto that mindset. Have a great next two weeks! -Kevin Leeper, CEO

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community I hope all of you survived a no surprise tax-day season, although some of us may have just kicked the surprise downstream in filing the old extension. I for one have yet to find out if a surprise awaits me. I write this on May Day, so another month is again behind us. This pay-period included annual celebrations for two of our very important service lines: Laboratory and Health Information Management. I extend my thanks to these two great MCH teams that play such instrumental roles within (and outside) our organization. Thank You All! We now look forward to National Nurses Week followed by National Hospital Week! I’d like to remind everyone that “survey preparedness” needs to be refreshed in everyone’s mind. It is easy to be complacent when the State of Kansas is so far behind in reviewing so many of its hospitals. And complacency can easily breed sloppiness and carelessness when it comes to keeping up with our annual training / CME recertifications or licensure requirements. We must ask ourselves that when a surveyor walks through our doors after nearly nine years since the last walk through, will they be able to readily spot some easy deficiencies? Are we as white-glove-clean as we desire to be…are we current with thorough review of our charts, our policies, and/or our job function checklists…are we current with our annual HIPPA, fire, electrical safety, and emergency preparedness training validations???? Showing a surveyor that we maintain easy to find evidence of all these things for each of our staff members will make us survey ready. I would allow that until each of us can speak confidently about these things (and attest to other department specific requirements) that we still have work to do. PLEASE SEE YOUR DEPARTMENT MANAGER if any of these items sound foreign to you…because surveyor’s desire to ask questions of whomever they come across. Thank you in advance for desiring to stay current. As summer approaches, we need to stay focused on preventative care for those in our community that may be taking time off and can better embrace taking care of themselves. Now is a great time to get annual checkups and to learn from us how to be healthy and stay healthy. Exercise is easier to embrace in nice weather. I encourage each of you to build an exercise routine, and invite a friend to join you, so you are more apt to stick with it. I am going to practice what I am now suggesting! To close, I ask again that you keep our patient’s needs and expectations foremost in your daily work thoughts, and I do thank you for holding onto that mindset. Have a great next two weeks! -Kevin Leeper, CEO

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community March Madness is behind us…congrats to Deb Benning for securing the local pool… and away we go into the busy cattle moving month of April, as the green grass is already looking lush all over our Flint Hills, along with some continuous burning.   We are showing three solid first quarter months behind us, even as April has softened a bit, volume wise. We just got word late this week that statewide, the release of multiple awaiting RHTP grant awards has been pushed back a month to May 15 th , to better rank and spread out the abundant number of worthy applications. Not sure what that will mean for the four submissions we have applied for to date, but we can hope that at least a couple of ours will rise to an offering status. The new rules for significant dollars available through the Evidence Based Practice pool of funding is just now being released, and I believe we will be qualified for participation in that program without a formal application - both through our hospital and through our four RHCs.   Our onsite 2025 Forvis Audit work has been completed, and from early dialogues, it appears that little has been discovered to alter our prior December YTD estimated results. Forvis anticipates a June presentation of their final report, a good bit earlier then they managed last year.   Our Department Managers were introduced to a Lean / Six Sigma Training Program this week, which was received with a lot of energy and great dialogues around four identified opportunities for improvement within our operations. Further work and training in these four areas will be focused on over the next few weeks at the staff level, so that more ideas can be generated from those in the front lines. I look forward to this process for problem solving to be adopted into our daily work routines. More to be reported on these four areas in the near future.     Just another word of encouragement to keep our patient’s needs and expectations foremost in your daily work thoughts, and I do thank you for that mindset. Have a great next two weeks! -Kevin Leeper, CEO

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community It does feel like Spring is well under way in Central Kansas! If one last ice storm forces me to scrape a windshield for the first time this winter (truly would be the first!), then I will be ok with it…not happy about it, but OK, because a blast won’t last long at this point. Now if we could just get some rain…and not so much to flood our parks this year.   I want to give a departmental SHOUT OUT this week. And the winner goes to our evolving Surgery Team!! The team consists of Jeremy, Vanessa, Sam, Tabatha, Mercedes, Morgan, Abby, Beverly, and Shaun / Bryce! And of course, they would not have a lot to do without our Surgeons: Lora and Brett Seigle, and Drs. Samani and Hunt!! Last Friday this team turned out nine cases for Dr. Hunt to mark a day absolutely worth shouting out! I feel certain it’s the highest number of non-eye cases we have done in one day in many a year! Nine satisfied patients left here that day and I just want to thank the team for a SUPER JOB DONE. And until you actually execute a day like that, you don’t go in thinking it can be done as efficiently as it was. So, I hope and trust our team learned something about themselves and are now confident that it can be done again and even reach the ten-spot! Go Team!   Another three RHTP grants were completed today, with Morris County Hospital attached as a participant to each! None of the three “network oriented” grants were alike, though two very similar, and the rules were clearly identified as saying a hospital can participate in multiple applications. We will hope for the best and be happy with any one or two of the three…certainly we won’t win three for three????? The capital grant submitted two weeks ago is supposed to announce its awardees in two more weeks.   I am grateful for what appears to be three solid months out of the 2026 gate. We do have a great team across all of our aisles here at MCH, who collectively keep things churning day in and day out. And this week we welcome into our folds the team led by Dr. John Mosier in Herington: Leann, Nicole and just yesterday being joined by our own Business Office staff member, Kayla Riffel-Condon. They have been preparing all of this week to be ready for a reopening as an MCH Clinic on Monday, April 6 th . Their Clinic Manager, Sara Roberts, has done a great job planning for this big day!   Thanks for always putting our patients FIRST. Have a Blessed Easter weekend! -Kevin Leeper, CEO

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community Motivated by the Rural Health Transformation Plan’s targeted commitment to funds for rural healthcare, announced by President Trump over six months ago, KDHE has at last through CMS began issuing the guidelines for applying for funding on the first three of 24 programs earmarking direct grant dollars to healthcare organizations across Kansas. In exchange for a check, organizations must demonstrate a plan for producing measurable results which will yield one or more of the following core value initiatives: 1.) create better health outcomes for Kansans, 2.) improve access for rural Kansans to a well-coordinated continuum of care, 3,) utilize more efficient newer technologies that help reduce healthcare costs, and 4.) use the funds in a manner that promotes financial sustainability for those delivering the service(s).   So, the race for dollars is on across Kansas, and the first deadline just passed us at noon on Friday the 20 th . MCH participated in this program calling for capital expenditures investing in continuum of care opportunities. We elected to ask for funds that will convert our 2.5-year vacated ambulance barn into a senior focused behavioral health outpatient program. Senior Life Solutions would be our partner in this venture and help us meet a missing service in our region. Depression and loneliness are common amongst our single seniors and there is currently no nearby deliverable that truly addresses this condition. The program will provide transportation to and from our facility for three days a week of group and/or individual activities and therapy.   In two more weeks, we will plan to respond to the next program deadline of asking for collaborative initiatives, between a network of healthcare providers, which can collectively work to yield improved quality outcomes, and also gravitate towards a reimbursement model based on outcomes vs. the fee-for-service model now deployed - by the end of 2031. It is nice to be in a position where 2-3 existing groups are courting us to align with them. I trust that we can make a choice of which group to more formally align with during our Board meeting this coming Wednesday.   At least one other funding program bears interest to MCH and its strategic outlook for this new era. Most likely it will be to immerse ourselves in the telehealth arena to better access specialty support in line with the care of our more ill and /or critical patients. This might be related to the collaborative component of aligning with larger hospitals or with contracted specialty groups that care to reach out to rural markets. We have been amazed at the number of opportunities that exist for this type of partnering.   These are busy, but exciting times, and we hope to soon be the benefactor of some new service line possibilities! -Kevin Leeper, CEO

Continued Dedicated Service to Our Community Month 2 of 2026 is now already behind us. What an eventful finish to its end, and we can sure be grateful (for now) that we are still seeing our surroundings fully intact and undisturbed, except for the desired rainfall. Middle East communities abroad aren’t so lucky.   I am pleased to have updated the tables below to reflect new 2026 targets for the various service lines and stats that we show you regularly. I am also pleased to share that we have more green values than red for the first time in some time…which even includes the surpassing of some larger 2026 targets in some areas, but in exceeding some reduced targets in a few other areas. That said I am going to sign off early as I am in preparation for a Critical Issues Workshop in Wichita tomorrow and Friday, and I need to get this out before the evening finishes. I will have more to say than I know now about some very interesting opportunities MCH can embrace relative to the Rural Health Transformation Grants, which are just now opening up for our applications to be considered.   Until next time, stay on the right path - and make each day amount to something good! -Kevin Leeper, CEO