Steward Health Care did not join other Massachusetts hospitals in recently reporting required financial information and results subsequently obtained by the News Service show the for-profit company posted a 6.54 percent margin across its eight hospitals as of June 30, 2015 despite negative total assets of more than $42 million.

Five of Steward's acute care hospitals posted negative total net assets but only one those hospitals, Carney Hospital in Dorchester, reported a negative total margin. Carney's negative 8.09 percent margin was coupled with negative total assets of nearly $44 million.

Brooke Thurston, a spokeswoman for Steward, said its negative total net assets are associated with Quincy Medical Center, which Steward closed in late 2014. Losses associated with Quincy Medical Center "were spread across the hospitals for several years," she said.

Steward last year said Quincy Medical Center was financially unsustainable because of competition from Boston-area medical centers, Medicare reimbursement cuts and Medicaid underfunding, rate disparities, and a decline in people seeking in-patient services.

The hospital had faced financial hardships for 20 years, leading to city and state bailouts of more than $100 million and ultimately federal bankruptcy, according to Steward officials. Steward invested $100 million in Quincy Medical Center since 2011, but it still had operating losses of nearly $20 million a year.

Now Steward is facing challenges at Carney Hospital, which is located over the Quincy border in the Dorchester section of Boston.

Increased patient volume and the addition of staff at Carney, including 100 physicians over the past year, have improved that hospital's performance, according to Thurston. Emergency department patient volume at Carney in 2015 is up 12 percent compared to 2014, with inpatient discharges up 15.6 percent and outpatient procedures up nearly 21 percent. Carney lost $1.2 million in the second quarter, down from a $3.4 million loss in the first quarter of 2015.

On Sept. 30, the Center for Health Information and Analysis reported that of the 51 acute care hospitals in Massachusetts covered in its report, 43 recorded positive total margins in the most recent reporting period, while eight had losses. Steward did not report its results in time for inclusion in the report.

The agency's report concluded that the overall profitability of the hospitals reporting remained stable. The total margin among reporting hospitals of 3.7 percent was 0.5 percentage points lower than the fiscal 2014 statewide median for all hospitals.

While only two of the 53 hospitals covered in the September report posted negative total assets - Tenet Healthcare's Metrowest Medical Center ($43.6 million) and Baystate Health's Baystate Noble Hospital ($7.6 million) - five of Steward's hospitals fell into that category.

The negative net assets at Steward hospitals ranged from $12.5 million at Holy Family & Merrimack to $17.9 million at Morton Hospital, $35.1 million at Norwood Hospital, $38.5 million at St. Elizabeth's Hospital and $44 million at Carney Hospital.

The Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA) on Sept. 29 notified Steward that it had not received required financial filings that were due on Aug. 15. On Sept. 30 - the day the agency reported on the finances of most acute care hospitals - a Steward spokeswoman told the News Service that there had been "a clerical delay on our end" and that Steward's financial filings were submitted that day.

In its Sept. 29 letter to Steward, CHIA deputy general counsel Nancy Maroney wrote that each hospital that fails to provide the requested information within two weeks will be assessed a fine of $1,000 per week for each week of delay after the two-week period.

CHIA spokesman Andrew Jackmauh said in an email, "Regarding the characterization of this as a clerical error, we had multiple communications with several people at Steward, notifying them that their filings were past due and that failure to meet this statutory obligation would result in their being omitted from the report."