Community Health Network Uses MedAssets Consulting Services and Technology to Create Sustainable Financial and Performance Improvements

As part of a system-wide initiative to accelerate revenue cycle performance, Community Health Network (Community), ranked among the nation’s most integrated health systems, successfully engaged MedAssets (NASDAQ: MDAS) and realized $26.7 million in cash improvement—$12.6 million of which had a positive impact on Community’s operating profit and bottom line. Community used MedAssets comprehensive consulting services to improve front- to back-end processes and procedures across its four Indianapolis hospitals. The engagement was supported and enhanced with MedAssets revenue cycle technologies. At the same time, MedAssets augmented the health system’s staff to accelerate reduction in accounts receivable (A/R) days. To date, Community has improved its cash position by $26.7 million and created a best practice environment for sustainable performance improvement.

Within the first 12 months, the Indiana-based health system:

• Increased Patient Access staff productivity by 100 percent
• Increased point of service collections by 50 percent by leveraging real-time workflow technology
• Reduced denials by 47 percent by introducing quality assurance programs
• Decreased A/R days by more than 20 percent

Community also realized nearly $1.2 million in additional savings by realigning internal and outsourced functions, as well as renegotiating key vendor contracts.

"MedAssets provided us with a detailed view of our business from a perspective that we were not able to see before,” said Jeff Kirkham, chief financial officer for Community’s clinical enterprise. "Their expertise in revenue cycle operations was instrumental in understanding that the potential to realize at least $25 million in revenue improvement was real. By taking an integrated approach of blending change management expertise with technology, we now have a best practice process environment, improved staff skill sets and a culture of consensus to help us continue to achieve our full potential for positive financial performance.”

Processes Supported by Technology

The MedAssets engagement began by mapping revenue cycle processes and staffing workflows to quantify potential revenue cycle improvement opportunity. These operational findings, plus data retrieval and interviews with more than 100 Community employees ranging from hospital leadership to front-line staff informed the organizational go-forward plan. Next, new processes, quality assurance programs, significant staff training and key workflow solutions were deployed to automate manual processes, centralized key functions, and identify and correct the root cause of denials, and enabled the collection of patient liabilities in both a pre-service and point of service environment.

"Small, yet significant improvements in critical revenue cycle areas, dramatically improved our financial and operational outcomes,” said Charles Meadows, vice president of Revenue Cycle for Community. "For example, we implemented a pre-visit function that increased our revenue centralization from 18 to 62 percent, which in turn enabled a 50 percent increase in point of service collections. Overall, this initiative has empowered our staff to share more data across the network and work with the right tools and workflows to proactively prevent revenue cycle backlog.”

"While each hospital has unique revenue cycle challenges and IT environments, our proven performance improvement approach is to combine process redesign, enabling technologies with staff training and augmentation to effectively improve our clients’ cash flow both in the short- and long-term,” said Greg Strobel, president of Revenue Cycle Management, MedAssets. "We are pleased our team of experts and expanded use of our solutions has led Community to realize such tremendous value. Moreover, by engaging every revenue cycle stakeholder in its cost improvement efforts, Community has successfully undertaken the change management essential to uncover savings opportunities and maintain an optimized revenue cycle.”

About Community Health Network

Ranked among the nation’s most integrated healthcare systems, Community Health Network is Central Indiana’s leader in access to innovative and compassionate healthcare services, where and when patients need them—in hospitals, in convenient health pavilions and doctor’s offices, in the workplace, at schools, in the home and online. As a non-profit health system with multiple sites of care and affiliates throughout Indiana, Community’s full continuum of care integrates hundreds of physicians, acute care and specialty hospitals, surgery centers, physician offices, home care services, walk-in care centers and employer health services. To put the needs and the convenience of patients first, Community pioneers advanced treatments and world-class health information technologies, with a focus on ease of access to exceptional care. For more information, please visit www.eCommunity.com.

About MedAssets

MedAssets (NASDAQ: MDAS) partners with healthcare providers to improve their financial strength by implementing revenue cycle, spend and clinical resource management solutions that help capture revenue, control cost, improve margins and cash flow, increase regulatory compliance, and optimize operational efficiency. MedAssets serves more than 180 health systems, 4,000 hospitals and 90,000 non-acute healthcare providers. The company currently manages $45 billion in supply spend and touches over $316 billion in total patient revenue annually through its revenue cycle solutions. For more information, please visit www.medassets.com.

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