Dan Raab, chief executive officer of Taylorville Memorial Hospital, was Tuesday's guest speaker at the weekly meeting of the Taylorville Kiwanis Club at the Taylorville Memorial Hospital auditorium.

Raab gave a brief overview of some of the new programs that the local hospital has rolled out, so that local residents don't have to travel out of town for health care. Those programs include the Senior Life Solutions program, new equipment such as diagnosis scopes, updated software for the hospital's C-T scanner, and new specialists that will practice at Taylorville Memorial.

Raab told the Kiwanis members regarding the Affordable Care Act, that while some people have been helped due to the new law, its 28-hundred pages of law, plus many thousands of pages of regulations, have been a challenge for the local hospital, and for the medical industry as a whole, to keep up with.

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He added that the federal mandate to go to electronic health records, actually reduced productivity due to the amount of work that it's taken to go from paper records to electronic.

Raab said the Taylorville hospital's patient mix includes 57-percent being Medicare, 22-percent with private insurance, 17-percent Medicaid, and 5-percent with no insurance. He added T-M-H provided some 4-million dollars in charity care, to local residents in 2013.

The Taylorville Kiwanis Club is part of global organization of volunteers dedicated to changing the world one child and one community at a time. Weekly meetings are held Tuesdays at noon at the Taylorville Memorial Hospital auditorium. For information on the club, go to taylorvillekiwanis.com.