Temple University Health reported a $17 million operating loss in the first quarter of fiscal 2025

Temple University Health System had an operating loss of $17.1 million in the three months that ended Sept. 30, compared to a loss of $26.1 million in the same period last year, the nonprofit health system reported to bondholders Tuesday.

Here are some details:

Revenue: Total revenue rose 11%, to $2.86 billion from $2.57 billion last year. Much of the revenue growth came from outpatient services, including strong revenue gains from in-house pharmacy businesses. Temple’s organ transplant services, particularly lung transplants, rebounded strongly after a slowdown caused by a shortage of nurse anesthetists, Temple’s chief accounting officer Mike DiFranco told investors on a webcast Wednesday. Temple performed 117 transplants overall in the September quarter, up from 95 last year.

Expenses: Long hospital stays that generate extra expenses — but no extra revenue because of the way hospitals are paid — have been a persistent problem for Temple and other area health systems. Temple’s average length of stay over the summer was 6.4 days, up from 6 days last year.

Temple has many patients that are hard to place after a hospital stay because they are dependent on opioids and other complicating factors, Temple Health president Mike Young said in an interview.

“If you take out the 30-day stays and the 60-day stays, we’re actually below what we would normally expect, but it’s the 20 hard-to-place patients every week that stay and block up the beds,” Young said.

Under Temple’s new contract with Keystone First, Southeastern Pennsylvania’s biggest Medicaid insurer, Temple received a per diem rate for patients that are ready to be discharged to a less intensive setting for care but can’t be placed.

“Now Keystone is very motivated to move the patient to a nursing home, because the nursing home is cheaper than our per diem. Now we have a partner in moving those patients,” Young said.

Notable: Fox Chase Cancer Center, one of Philadelphia’s three federally designated comprehensive cancer centers, will resume receiving annual grants next year of $4.5 million to $5 million from the National Cancer Institute, Young said.

The center went three years without the NCI grants because it didn’t score well enough in the review for its latest renewal. The focus of the review is on research and institutional support. Temple’s proposal at the time to sell Fox Chase to Thomas Jefferson University counted against it in the rating. Ultimately, Jefferson backed out in 2020. “We fixed all the things that were supposed to be fixed, so now we’re eligible for the grant,” Young said.