A Client’s Perspective on the RCM Buyer Journey

Former CEO of Sutter Shared Services talks about the decision to outsource

Date 09/06/2024

Read Time 2 minutes

RCM Partnerships Enterprise Solutions RCM Outsourcing Industry Insight

Healthcare executives are tasked with balancing financial stability while ensuring top-tier patient care. The complexities of revenue cycle management (RCM) can strain resources and divert focus from a health system’s core mission. What worked a few years ago is not enough to get health systems where they need to be today. That’s why many leading health systems are turning to strategic RCM partnerships.

Watch the video to hear from the former CEO of Sutter Shared Services on how they made the decision to outsource their RCM operations.

Part of our journey and our decision to outsource, you know, we had some significant financial challenges that we had to face. Internally, we had made cost reductions, material cost reductions. We had done all sorts of projects from supply chain to revenue cycle to turning around the rest of our back office functions. But really, we just couldn't get to a sustainable margin point that we felt like we needed. And sometimes from a health system standpoint, you look at, well, how much cash flow, how much free cash flow, how much margin do I generate to make the capital investments that I need? And when you went to calculate that out and look at our budget, we just couldn't get there without some bigger moves. So therefore we went to the market, we did an RFP, we looked at the top suppliers, we landed on R1 through that process, and we got to the financial pieces we needed, but we also got to a place that we felt like our employees would have a good opportunity. We felt like there was good technology investment. We felt like there was good oversight. So we originally went to market primarily from a financial standpoint, but also found a place we felt good about from, again, an employee standpoint and also technology, regulatory, everything else.