A county hospital carries a kind of responsibility that most organizations never have to think about. When someone in Adams County has a bad night, a hard diagnosis, or a baby on the way, the hospital is where they go. It is also one of the larger employers in the area, which means it is holding two things at once: the health of its neighbors and the livelihoods of the people who care for them.
Adams Memorial Hospital, part of Adams Health Network in Decatur, works at that intersection every day. Behind the exam rooms and the operating suites there is an organization with payroll, purchasing, technology, regulatory obligations, and a balance sheet that has to hold up over decades, not quarters. Kyle Sprunger, Assistant CFO at Adams Memorial Hospital, works on that side of the building, where healthcare and finance meet and where the list of things to keep an eye on never really gets shorter.
What makes their story worth telling is a decision they have made and keep making. Across the country, plenty of small-town hospitals have been folded into larger systems, with the big calls moving somewhere else. Adams Health Network has chosen a different path, and they wrote it down. The first three words of their vision statement are to remain independent.
Here's Kyle Sprunger of Adams Memorial Hospital, in his own words:
Independence is easy to say and harder to live with. It means the hospital owns its own decisions about service lines, staffing, equipment, and the shape of care in the county. It also means the hospital owns its own risk. There is no distant parent organization to absorb a hard year. When you choose that, the partners you bring in around you matter more, because each one either supports that independence or slowly erodes it.
That is the lens Kyle brings to a banking relationship. A larger organization has needs that go well beyond a checking account, and the question is not only whether an institution can meet them, but whether the institution's own priorities line up with the hospital's. As he puts it, he likes working with a local financial institution because they have the same mission, invested in the community rather than spread out across the state.
Two Organizations With the Same Reason to Stay Put
There is a natural symmetry between a county hospital and a community bank. Both are old enough to have served several generations of the same families. Both are judged less on advertising than on what happens when someone walks in with a problem. And both have to make decisions with a long horizon, because the people affected are not going anywhere.
Kyle notices how First Bank of Berne treats its own people, and he takes that as information. Valuing people, in his framing, is not just about patients and customers. It includes the associates who work for the organization. When he interacts with the bank, he sees the same commitment to employees and to customers, and that is part of why he wants to be a customer.
Security is the other piece he does not take lightly. Healthcare organizations handle sensitive information under strict rules, and a hospital finance office has to be confident that its accounts and payments are handled carefully and that the technology behind them stays current. Kyle says the hospital has complete confidence in the bank to maintain that high-level security and to be up to date with technology. That confidence is not glamorous work. It shows up in things like keeping business accounts protected from fraud, reviewed and updated quietly, year after year.
Local Decisions, Both Directions
The part of the relationship that seems to matter most is where decisions get made. As a county hospital, Adams Health Network is committed to the idea that the course of their future as a healthcare provider is determined locally. They found the same posture on the banking side, where the people weighing a request are the ones who live in the same county and understand what the request is for.
Kyle offered one small detail that says a lot about how that works in practice.
"If the president of the bank says, here's my cell phone number, call me if there's a problem, that means he's got good confidence, he's got good people working for him."
That is not really a story about a phone number. It is a story about an organization willing to be reached, and about a leader who trusts his team enough to make that offer without worrying about what the call might be.
The rest of it is ordinary in the best sense. This is not a relationship that lives in quarterly reviews and conference calls.
"We know the people at the First Bank of Berne. You know, we see them, go to church with them, we see them in the community."
That familiarity cuts both ways. The bank has been a supporter of the hospital over the years, and the hospital's people run into the bank's people at the grocery store and the ball diamond. When something needs attention, nobody has to start by explaining who they are or what Adams County is like.
Kyle sums up the working experience simply. First Bank of Berne makes it easy. For a finance team with a long list of things to worry about, easy is not a small word. It means one fewer item that requires managing, and a partner whose reasons for staying local match the hospital's own.
Independence, it turns out, is not something an organization holds alone. It is held with the people you choose to work alongside. If your organization has made a similar choice about where its decisions get made, the business bankers at First Bank of Berne are worth a conversation.