CASE STUDY
Swift action safeguards financial stability during holiday outage.
End-to-end RCM partnership ensures continuity of care after
systems are compromised from cyberattack.
SNAPSHOT
A large health system faced a significant disruption when their systems were compromised by a cyberattack. As their end-to-end RCM partner, we responded with same-day systems analysis, redeployed resources, and worked alongside the client to engage payers and maintain operational stability.
Within two weeks, a paper backlog supporting nearly 100K patient encounters was scanned and translated into actionable data, totaling $1.2 billion in gross charges. Within 90 days, paper-based records were digitized and systems, including Epic, were fully restored.
PROFILE
- Mid-sized community health system
- < $5B NPR
- Southeast region
- End-to-end RCM partner
Challenges
Solutions
Within 24 hours of the outage, key Ensemble leaders, including our Epic Services team, patient access and revenue integrity teams, were in-route to work alongside our client to conduct a detailed systems analysis and develop and execute a targeted recovery strategy.
Two days after the system-wide outage, the source of the compromise was identified, critical systems were safeguarded and the detailed recovery plan was put into action.
I'm very pleased with the partnership and the engagement, which got to a very high level. When we had a serious issue, the firm had boots on the ground. They deployed staff to help us out. Having the value of a true partner who responds to our needs is incredible.
Ensemble’s strategic and immediate actions led to successful crisis management through:
- Deploying on-site support + conducting real-time communication through the establishment of a joint command center at the client’s site for real-time data sharing and decision-making to maintain operational and financial stability.
- Facilitating operational + care continuity by having Ensemble team members physically present at hospitals throughout the system to support staff and patients, address urgent needs and ensure stability during this downtime.
- Implementing a tailored communication and denial prevention strategy that proactively targeted over 40 payers, outlining the details of the outage and requesting waivers for consideration for affected items, which led to the prevention of downstream denials and detailed tracking of payer responses.
- Orchestrating the restoration process, which included hiring a third party to scan the paper records for nearly 100K patient encounters within just two weeks at no additional cost to the client, then leveraging our Epic services team and coding staff to translate the scanned images to actionable data to support the efficient and rapid input of $1.2 billion in gross charges into Epic.
Results
processed in two weeks
systems + successful migration
of paper records