Hospital Corporation of America Improves Processes, Culture and Bottom Line

Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) has a lot at stake: the well-being of millions of patients per year is in the hands of tens of thousands of employees and health care providers associated with HCA's nearly 200 hospitals and more than 100 out-patient centers.   While patient volumes are growing, so is the cost of care.  It is imperative for a company as vast as HCA to tightly manage operations while it measures patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes.     Yet the health care IT environment is notoriously fragmented, with lack of integration between admissions, claims, clinical, financial and other operational and financial systems.   

HCA executives realized that the Emergency Department (ED) is the gateway for many patients' longer term relationship with the company.  They understood that some facilities' EDs were out-performing the others, and wanted to use what worked well in better -performing facilities throughout the hospital network.  An ED dashboard was implemented using arcplan to capture key metrics such as wait times for lab results, cost of care and patient satisfaction scores to identify areas for improvement and standardization.  The implementation provided real-time access to critical data that, before, had to be manually extracted from systems and loaded into spreasheets for analysis.

HCA also had challenges related to financial reporting.  HCA accountants could not easily extract meaningful data from paper-based reporting systems.  How could paper-based systems possibly provide insight into the 1.6 million admissions a year, when each one is a bit different?    HCA's ten Patient Account Service Centers needed an efficient and effective way to increase access to and improve the analysis of the 18+ terabytes of data stored in the NCR Teradata warehouse and its Hyperion Essbase financial system.  HCA implemented a Revenue Cycle Executive Management and Reporting (EMR) portal to centralize service revenue cycle operations and automate reporting.   The company now tracks and can drill down (to the patient and provider level) into performance metrics such as performance and productivity, credit balance, insurance denials, discrepancies and upfront collection analysis.

"arcplan allows us to respond to anything going on in the industry."
Lisa Summers, HCA Financial Services Group COO

Benefits: HCA's ED Dashboard and Revenue Cycle Executive Management and Reporting (EMR) portal enable management of complex operation.

HCA has derived many benefits from its arcplan implementation, which touches more than a dozen departments and thousands of people.   Finance and Operational Departments get a broad and deep spectrum of information for reporting, ad hoc queries and analysis across the hospitals and out-patient centers.

The company credits arcplan with allowing department heads, individual contributors in the the Finance area and company executives make better financial and clinical decisions.

Click here to download the HCA Case Study in PDF format (Adobe Reader required).