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

When it was built in 1916, no one imagined the quaint Druid City Ini 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 Oi 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 signii cant improvements in the organization's A/R days and overall i nancial results, but felt limited by a reliance on manual processes, lack of staf 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 ei cient system, and consumed 50 FTEs throughout the organization—30 of them in the CBO."