Mississippi Teaching Hospital Heals Itself
Client: University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC)
Challenge: With four years of operating losses over a five-year period, Mississippi’s only teaching hospital needed to achieve a 5 percent operating margin, fund new initiatives and provide needed investment capital.
Solution: Develop and implement a Margin Improvement Plan around eight core operational areas.
Results: Cash collections are up by more than $86 million per year through both revenue cycle redesign and significant improvements in patient flow and bed management. Supply chain efforts have netted $10.2 million, while total margin improvement results are $102 million. And, in 2008, UMMC was named a Top 100 Hospital by Thomson Healthcare.
Want More Information?
As the state of Mississippi’s sole academic medical center, the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) in Jackson has a three-pronged mission: education, research and patient care. But the hospital’s lack of modern revenue cycle, supply chain and patient care processes was resulting in unsustainable financial losses.
Taking an holistic approach
Partnering with CSC, UMMC developed a Margin Improvement Plan (MIP) around eight key areas simultaneously — supply chain, operations costs, indigent care, volume growth, revenue enhancement, patient access and flow, practice improvement, and perioperative services.
“We have really seen the advantage of hospitals doing margin improvement in a comprehensive and synergistic manner, rather than taking the traditional piecemeal approach,” says Kent Giles, CSC account executive.
Updating archaic systems and practices
The complex process of ensuring that the right treatments are given to the right patient at the right time was complicated by the hospital’s 1960s-era paper-based supply chain and clinical systems.
The problems with revenue cycle revolved around insurance companies denying patient claims due to a lack of insurance verification and authorization, as well as missing information and incorrect coding.
And, on the patient flow and access side, we looked at every major clinical process and developed guidelines, starting with proper admission requirements.
Partnering for change
Today, a triad team — consisting of a case manager, social worker and utilization review nurse — contributes not only to significant improvements in care management but also to the bottom line, by categorizing patients correctly as either out-patients, observation patients or inpatients.
“We could have never orchestrated the significant amount of positive change that has occurred in this organization in the last two years without CSC as our partner,” says Harris.