Overview: About Emergency Care Consultants (ECC)
With a staff of nearly 175 providers and support staff, Emergency Care Consultants (ECC) is the leading employer of Emergency Medicine professionals in Minnesota’s Twin Cities area. An expansion into the southern region of the Twin Cities in 2024 brought their annual patient volume up to 275,000 a year across 10 hospitals. At the same time, ECC sought a new revenue cycle partnership to provide data transparency and proactive support to improve income in a challenging reimbursement environment.
Data Transparency Improves Reimbursement and Business Decisions
Data access was a driving force behind the search for new revenue cycle management (RCM) support. Data previously provided to ECC was often incomplete, lacked context, or arrived too late to be actionable.
“We struggled to understand the gaps between the work we were doing and the payments we were receiving from the insurance companies,” recalls Jeff Geddes, MD, Vice President of Finance for ECC.
Leveraging vSight™, Ventra Health’s powerful Data & Analytics platform, the Ventra team significantly streamlined access and improved the quality of the data. An intuitive self-service dashboard now provides real-time insights into billing performance and key metrics. Working closely with ECC, Ventra also set up custom reports to track and improve priority RCM metrics, such as claims coded, claims billed, acuity curves, and cash ramp-up. Client success and data professionals consult directly with ECC to put the metrics in context and use them to make meaningful RCM improvements.
A few examples:
- Coding acuity curve—ECC is particularly focused on monitoring care Levels 4 and 5 to ensure the practice is successfully getting reimbursed for the high-acuity care they provide. In tandem with data reporting, Ventra also delivers individualized documentation feedback and education to help providers accurately document their services to support appropriate reimbursement. ECC almost immediately saw material improvement in their coding distribution and total RVU per patient.
- RVUs—ECC’s case volume varies across its 10 sites. Tracking RVUs helps ensure ECC is maintaining production output in line with expectations for each site.
- Production levels by provider type—Case acuity fluctuates across sites, as well, with some sites well-suited to the skill sets of advanced practice providers (APPs) or nurse practitioners (NPs) and others needing more physician support. Custom reporting helps ECC ensure each treatment site is staffed with the most appropriate and effective provider mix for each treatment site.
“Having a partner really look at our metrics and use them to improve processes and fix what wasn’t working has been very positive.”
Dr. Jeff Geddes, Vice President of Finance for ECC
Communication Facilitates Successful Implementation
A commitment to transparency also ensured a seamless and smooth transition to Ventra with no financial impact or disruption. An onboarding team met weekly with ECC in the lead up to go-live, and they continued on through a 90-day post-live optimization period to ensure metrics were tracking properly and to resolve any issues immediately.
The groundwork for success was laid during the contracting phase, which Dr. Geddes credits with enabling the team to go live two months earlier than expected. Conducting thorough discussions up front, even before the contracts were finished, cleared potential hurdles and fast-tracked the implementation.
“Ventra took the time to understand the nuances of our practice, knew what payers we primarily dealt with, and understood all the pieces to put in place with our two big health systems,” he says. “That got us up and running without delays or cash-flow issues.”
Shared Values Forges Strong Partnership
Going forward, ECC and Ventra are continuing to fine-tune reporting, expand the metrics available through the self-service dashboard, and search for opportunities to optimize processes and improve reimbursement. ECC also plans to leverage Ventra’s contracting expertise to evaluate and renegotiate its contracts with both payers and facilities.
Close collaboration and a high degree of responsiveness on both sides has created the partnership needed for long-term success.
“Engagement and commitment from ECC’s leadership plays a huge role in the results we have been able to accomplish,” says AJ Hobbs, Client Success Vice President for Ventra Health. “Open communication and alignment of goals is building a strong relationship between our teams.”
“We share a lot of the same values and culture,” Dr. Geddes says.
On par with revenue results, ECC values timely responses, a deep bench of support, and a willingness to dig in and solve problems.
“Ventra is excellent at that,” Dr. Geddes says.
Download Success Story as PDF
