Healthcare Matters

With almost 25,000 employees, The St. Joseph Health (SJH) is a $4.7 billion IDS (integrated healthcare delivery system) sponsored by the St. Joseph Health Ministry. It provides a full range of care facilities including 14 acute care hospitals, home health agencies, hospice care, outpatient services, skilled nursing facilities, community clinics, and physician organizations throughout California, Texas and New Mexico.

That’s a big system.

So MedAssets was more than pleased today to announce that St. Joseph’s not only renewed its Spend and Clinical Resource Management agreement with the company, but it also contracted to add a few more. Specifically, SJH added MedAssets Access Integrity and Charge Integrity solutions to automate its revenue cycle processes and workflows. The goal of the Revenue Cycle initiative is to improve point of service collections, enhance contract management to identify underpayments, denials and late charges more quickly and accurately to enhance reimbursements.

The new enterprise agreement builds upon SJH’s success in using MedAssets strategic sourcing and supply chain optimization solutions to reduce the costs of quality care delivery, resulting in more $180 million in documented savings over the relationship. “By engaging expert, technology-enabled services and support from MedAssets, we have achieved significant cost savings and created greater operational efficiencies without distraction from our primary goal of delivering clinical excellence,” said Jim McManus, vice president, Finance, St. Joseph Health. “From our first encounter, MedAssets brought transparency and accountability into our business dealings, and has demonstrated those principles ever since; you can’t place a dollar value on that.”

The new agreement calls for continuing use of the MedAssets group purchasing organization (GPO) services while adding two Web-based business intelligence (BI) solutions, Service Line Analytics and Strategic Information. These BI tools will support SJH in analyzing both the financial performance of its service lines and diagnosis groups, as well as aggregate supply chain data to improve purchasing compliance and standardization and identify savings opportunities.

“We are gratified that St. Joseph Health has chosen MedAssets as it further pursues strategies to enhance revenue and deliver excellence in clinical care at a lower cost,” said Rand Ballard, senior executive vice president and chief customer officer, MedAssets.

There can be no doubt that Mr. Ballard is pleased and relieved. Landing a big customer is one thing. Keeping them in the fold is yet another. Despite popular opinion to the contrary, GPOs continue to find ways to keep their customers’ engaged –and happy. And it’s no small task, given the ever-increasing number of competitive alternatives.

—Tom Finn