Lincoln Health is a critical access hospital on the eastern plains of Colorado with big dreams. This is a place with a strong culture, very tight with the community as most rural hospitals are. Being a rural healthcare system, we don't have access to the resources that you could get easily in a metropolitan area like Denver. We do carry a large portion of our patient population in a Medicare, Medicaid space, and when there are broad adjustments made or cuts in this case, unfortunately, we in the rural health space really need to stay on top of our claims so that we don't see a reduction in our cash position. The complexity of billing in healthcare in general is getting increasingly problematic. We don't necessarily have the expertise, so we're constantly looking for ways either internally or bringing in help from the outside. Our previous rev cycle vendor was not able to meet the needs and expertise and our ability to help us with some of our key rev cycle metrics that we depend on month over month to make sure that our cash situation here in the rural health space can sustain us, and that's a real concern for us. A little over a year ago, we were looking for a new billing partner, somebody who understood our electronic health record, somebody who understood the needs of a rural community. And we're very pleased to be introduced to R1, and we put them through the paces at the time, and they met the criteria that we needed. Our partnership and R1's ability to self examine from a quality perspective the coding aspects has been huge in helping us increase our metrics from a rev cycle perspective. Also, ability for R1 to bring strategists to the table, to look at the bigger picture when it comes to claim rules and some of the minutiae that really make getting the claims out clean actually possible, and of course leading to us the ability to collect in a more timely manner. We don't want to work with a nameless, faceless corporation where the my client contact is constantly changing. I've been very pleased to be able to call some of the executives at R1 and say, hey, we need some help here, and they respond. They've come out, they've visited our hospital, they understand the challenges that we face. We believe we found a partner in R1 that aligns with our culture and value. It has a deep appreciation for the challenges of getting claims out and getting paid upon them and how important it is to us and how a week over week delay can oftentimes be critical where a large health system doesn't experience that. R1 for us was a turnkey solution. They brought us coding, they brought us billing, they brought us the denial management, and really the management of the entire revenue cycle process. We don't have the ability, as many rural hospitals don't have the ability, to do that on our own. We're just too small. We've had a cash position that was putting us at severe risk not too long ago, and our R1 partnership has been able to lift us from that space. Some of the programs that we've been able to institute, because we've been more successful in our ability to collect. We have an infusion therapy program. We initiated an orthopedic surgery program that's important to us because it offers services to the community that people would otherwise have to travel into the city. The fact that you could do it locally has helped out tremendously. I am passionate that R1 is the right partner, for us and many facilities like us in the critical access space. I don't know of another business office vendor that can provide, the level of service and the access to the expertise that we've received. There's only so far we can go from an in house staffing perspective, and I I can confidently say that we would not be where we are today without R1's help, and that place is trending upward. What has been very good is R1's willingness to work with us to continue to improve and get us where we need to be, and so we're very proud of that working relationship.
