Case Study: Northwest Community Hospital

About the Client

Northwest Community Hospital (NCH) has been serving the Northwest Chicago area for nearly 60 years. The health system has 489 beds, four immediate care centers, seven outpatient imaging centers, and serves more than 20,000 patients.

Engagement with Healthfuse was very eye-opening. When you have that many vendors, you have no real way of understanding what true vendor performance means. Healthfuse aligned it all and made it easy. We’ve been able to reduce our bad debt numbers, bene tting the organization greatly.

Tracy Bonnell, Executive Director of Revenue Cycle
Northwest Community Hospital

Challenge

NCH used several vendors to manage its portfolio of accounts, but the health system lacked a reliable process to monitor and reconcile these accounts. There were few KPIs or best practices in place and vendor contracts hadn’t been reviewed for market parity for years. Tracy Bonnell, Executive Director of Revenue Cycle at NCH, knew many vendors were underperforming but had limited means to analyze and drive performance improvement. She needed help identifying pain points with vendors and putting processes in place to ensure NCH receives the best return possible.

Solution

NCH chose Healthfuse in part because of its AutoRecon inventory reconciliation service. With AutoRecon, Healthfuse can quickly track historical compliance rates to identify trends and monitor improvements. Through cross-reconciliation, Healthfuse is also able to identify accounts placed with multiple vendor inventories at the same time. This is essential to ensuring vendor compliance and avoiding vendor fees for the same payment. Healthfuse has and continues to review NCH’s vendor contracts for cost savings opportunities.

Results

Healthfuse identified a recurring P&L opportunity for NCH of of $2.1 million with a three-year impact of $10.9 million.

Recurring P&L opportunity of
$2.1M
Three-year impact of
$10.9M

To date, Healthfuse has delivered:

Collections Improvements

$10.9M

  • in incremental cash improvement to-date (from liquidation)

$49K

  • in recoveries to-date

Cost Savings

45%

  • improvement in outsourcers’ productivity

$333K

  • in contract savings to-date