PR - EMH Med Center Selects TransUnion to Reduce Its Bad Debt

EMH Regional Healthcare System has selected TransUnion’s Healthcare Revenue Cycle Platform (HRCP) to help address increasing bad debt and streamline administration of its charity care policy.

The EMH Regional Healthcare System is a 434-bed, non-profit hospital system with campuses in Elyria, Amherst, and Avon, Ohio. For a century, the EMH Regional Healthcare System has served the needs of Lorain County and greater western Cuyahoga County residents.  The hospital system 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 patient’s have come to expect, we realized that we needed to reduce the financial impact of growing bad debt.”

EMH selected TransUnion’s HRCP, a Web-based solution that streamlines the hospital’s admission processes by helping the staff verify patient identities, make objective payment determinations and match patients with assistance programs and charity care, all at the point of service.

“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.”

EMH also will benefit from reducing returned mail as well.  According to Wells, five percent of the population the hospital serves is uninsured, but represents 55 percent of the bad addresses in the hospital’s database.  By using HRCP, EMH can confirm a patient’s identity at the point of service, thereby reducing medical bills sent to wrong addresses and subsequently writing that care off as bad debt.  EMH anticipates that it will go live with HRCP in mid-January.