Susquehanna Health Hospitals utilized the staffing of Expeditive to assist us with a very difficult conversion of our hospital information system. S.H. Hospitals were a beta site for our HIS vendor for their new patient accounting system. The system had many initial problems that were going to take time to work out. In fact, at one time, we had as many as 500 tickets for corrections to various revenue cycle issues. During this period after implementation, accounts receivable days outstanding increased by 15 days, which had an adverse impact of over 10 million dollars on our cash flow.
The patient accounting department needed to do something drastic in terms of addressing the billing backlog, and I personally contacted Expeditive to intercede and they hired the staff and provided continuity on our A/R project. The engagement continued for another 15 months, until our accounts receivable totals were back to a low 40 days outstanding. During that time, the contracted staff identified billing problems for us to communicate to the vendor. They forced the dropping of bills and submission to payers. They provided aggressive follow-up with payers, then also provided us with an A/R monitoring process which we still use today.
Given the difficult situation in which both personnel and technical issues needed to be addressed, Expeditive did an outstanding job. Their commitment to performance for their client was paramount and allowed us to return to a normal state of operations as soon as possible. As a result, I would not hesitate to recommend them to a hospital looking for assistance in A/R billing or follow-up issues.
Charles J. Santangelo
CPA, FHFMA, Executive Vice President CFO
Susquehanna Health