EMH Regional Healthcare System will address its bad debt using TransUnion's Healthcare Revenue Cycle Platform, designed to help the Ohio hospital system streamline its registration and collection processes.
Officials at EMH, a 434-bed non-profit hospital system with campuses in Elyria, Amherst and Avon, Ohio, recently noticed a margin squeeze as a result of increasing patient liability for services. According to Philip Wells, director of Patient Financial Services, the hospital has experienced 17 percent growth in uncompensated care while reimbursement remained flat over the past two years.
"Over the last two decades, we successfully kept bad debt expense to a minimum," said Wells. "However, recent changes in the local economy and the growing share of patient liability for services resulted in escalating delinquencies. To keep prices competitive while providing the service our patients have come to expect, we realized that we needed to reduce the financial impact of growing bad debt."
TransUnion's HRCP is a Web-based solution designed to streamline the hospital system's admission processes by helping staff verify patient identities, make objective payment determinations and match patients with assistance programs and charity care.
"Although we looked at several solutions, we selected TransUnion's HRCP because we liked its real-time access to data and built-in charity determination," said Wells. "By objectively and quickly identifying those patients who qualify for charity care that would otherwise be considered bad debt at the point of service, we'll benefit in three ways. First, we can protect those unable to pay and our non-profit status. Second, we'll significantly reduce administrative work involved in processing charity applications. Finally, we can identify those with an ability to pay and improve our collections."
By being able to verify patient identities, EMH also hopes to reduce returned mail.
Wells says 5 percent of the population the hospital serves is uninsured, but represents 55 percent of the bad addresses in the hospital's database. By confirming a patient's identity at the point of service, the hospital will be able to reduce the occurrence of medical bills being sent to wrong addresses and subsequently can write that care off as bad debt.