Just four months into 2015, Providence Holy Cross medical centers have been significantly impacted by the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare, hospital officials said.

A decrease in federal funding coupled with a sudden rise in the number of patients seeking care has created new challenges for Providence Holy Cross officials, according to Chief Executive Dr. Bernie Klein.

“For the country to pay for this insurance and the supplements and all, they’ve had to decrease reimbursements to hospitals,” Klein said, “the theory being you’re no longer seeing uninsured patients; therefore you’ll get paid through their insurance plan. The problem is it isn’t an even swap.”

Though ObamaCare has provided insurance for thousands of previously uninsured Americans, a large number of undocumented individuals remain uninsured and continue to seek care at hospital emergency rooms in the event of traumatic illness or injury.

Related: Providence Holy Cross Medical Center Celebrates 30 Years For Trauma Center

While hospitals are required by law to provide care to trauma patients regardless of ability to pay, federal trauma funding has sequentially decreased every year, along with government funding to help hospitals cover the cost of caring for “the poor and vulnerable,” called disproportionate share funding.

“They’re shifting these dollars to provide insurance,” Klein said. “The money we used to get from trauma funds and from disproportionate share funding has gone down and there is still a significant uninsured population out there in the community.”

In addition, in the last few years hospitals like Providence Holy Cross saw a two percent reduction in reimbursement for Medicare patients, which Klein called “a big drop” that impacted budgeting plans “overnight.”

Along with the decrease in funding, hospitals officials are also dealing with a sudden influx of new patients who were previously uninsured prior to ObamaCare.

“Now we have a whole population of patients who previously had no insurance and are suddenly insured,” Klein said. “They have a choice of where they seek their care, and what we’re seeing is a shift away from some of our county hospitals to the private community hospitals such as Holy Cross.”

Providence Holy Cross officials saw record numbers of emergency room patients in January, with the average number of patients in a 24-hour period jumping from about 280 patients to more than 400 patients.

“That’s a huge increase,” Klein said. “To meet this demand, we increased staffing and the number of physicians on board.”

Plans are also in the works to expand the emergency room at Providence for the second time in order to continue to meet the increasing needs of the community.

“It’s been a challenge,” Klein said, “and we are definitely here to serve.”