Case Study: DCH Health Reduces Costs, Denied Claims, A/R Days And $23.9M In Receivables Using CareMedic's eFR®

When it was built in 1916, no one imagined the quaint Druid City Infi rmary would eventually be transformed into today's DCH Health System (DCH), the largest healthcare provider in West Alabama. Serving seven counties through its four locations, community-owned DCH generates approximately $1.5B in annual gross revenue.

The system consists of DCH Regional Medical Center, Northport Medical Center, Fayette Medical Center and Pickens County Medical Center, and operates a Central Business Offi ce (CBO) in Tuscaloosa, which handles the billing operations for all but the Pickens County location.

In 2006, director of business services Mike Wilson had made signifi cant improvements in the organization's A/R days and overall fi nancial results, but felt limited by a reliance on manual processes, lack of staff accountability, and the inability to get what he felt the organization needed from its existing patient accounting system. "We were working on a manual system—in the most literal sense," he explains. "At the beginning of each month, we would print out paper ATBs and hand them to the people responsible for each area. They would start at the top and work their way through that ATB every month. It was not a very effi cient system, and consumed 50 FTEs throughout the organization—30 of them in the CBO."