University Hospitals Health System, Inc.

The Client

Leading health care services provider University Hospitals Health System, Inc., (UHHS), recognized that delivering world-class heath care service is only part of what it takes to stay competitive.

The Challenge

The Central Business Office (CBO) of UHHS was facing increasing levels of accounts receivable for its main academic medical center and the three community hospitals it served. In addition, UHHS was experiencing high levels of filing write-offs, bad debts in excess of budgeted amounts, and a large backlog of unprocessed credits. UHHS's central business office (CBO) had evolved as a collection of functions, processes, and technologies, but it was lacking overall effectiveness. They needed a clear view of the bigger revenue operations picture-how its people, functional teams, and technologies could work better together to be more competitive as a business unit and an organization. UHHS's central billing office needed to reassess-and ultimately redesign-the way it conducted it's revenue cycle operations.

The Solution

BearingPoint assessed the core areas affecting UHHS's revenue cycle and cash flow efficiency: its billing processes and policies, staffing patterns and work flows, technology, and outsourcing options.

An in-depth analysis by the BearingPoint team-working closely with UHHS's CBO-revealed that UHHS's revenue operations required significant refocus and redesign to eliminate redundancies and maximize efficiency. The result of the analysis was a series of targeted implementation initiatives for revenue operations improvement, including:

• Reorganizing UHHS's CBO to provide more effective staffing levels, leadership, and team functionality
• Expanding training for CBO personnel
• Improving billing, secondary billing, collections, cash posting, and customer service procedures
• Documenting new processes and procedures, including training manuals and flowcharts
• Implementing productivity reporting and goal setting procedures to track workflow efficiency and audit performance levels
• Revising job descriptions to delineate roles and responsibilities
• Enhancing use of various IT systems
• Identifying strategic outsourcing of certain collections

The Benefits

Following the implementation of these initiatives, UHHS realized dramatic improvements in its cash flow-an increase of 14 percent, or about $40 million-and a reduction of 25 days in days revenue in accounts receivable.

In addition, as a result of the procedural improvements, UHHS is anticipating reduced levels of claims write-off due to timely filing issues and decreased bad debt expense in the future.

The bottom-line: UHHS has significantly strengthened its revenue operations, cash flow, and competitive position in the health care market.
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