Brian Fitzgerald is the Director of Finance of St. James’ Hospital, one of the largest university hospitals in Ireland with an annual budget of €400m. Brian has held a number of senior management positions within the hospital and wider health service for many years.
Brian says” I have been using the services of Intrum Justitia for many years now. They originally provided debt collection services on unpaid hospital accounts and are now contracted for the management of billing follow up and insurance claims”.
Why did you decide to contract Intrum Justitia for the management of billing follow up?
Well, there were a number of reasons why I decided to engage an external resource for billing follow up.
- We continually need to increase resources to support to our front line staff in the hospital in order that we provide the best possible service to our patients, terminology that Intrum Justitia are very familiar with.
- We calculated that by using an outside resource to do follow up on our billing and collections process, that we could get efficiencies of scale. In parallel, I anticipated that there would be a review at national level of administration resources employed in the health service and that this function had the potential to free up resources for front line services.
- We also envisaged that we could benefit from the investments companies such as Intrum Justitia make in technology, communication, HR, training and collection techniques.
How did you choose Intrum Justitia?
Following in-depth discussions with the collections industry and in particular Intrum Justitia we accepted that the possibilities of having this function managed from an external perspective were very real and achievable.
We then tendered for such services and invited interested parties to respond to a request for information. We subsequently received a large number of tender submissions from both national and international service providers in this specialist area.
An Evaluation Committee was set up to review the submissions and make recommendations. Following a recommendation by the Committee, we then commenced exclusive negotiations with Intrum Justitia.
Do you feel this has been successful to the hospital?
Since we exchanged contracts with Intrum Justitia they have worked very closely with us at the implementation and delivery of the service. I am happy with the decision and I am particularly happy with our chosen partners.
I think this has been a win - win situation for all parties involved. I am achieving my objectives under the value for money programme and I am sure Intrum Justitia have earned increased revenues as a direct result of this contract.
I have no doubt that so far our partners Intrum have their eye firmly on the ball and together we will continue to improve and enhance the external management approach if our current experience is anything to go on.
What do you think the future holds for the hospital?
Well there is no doubt that we in the public sector and in particular the Health Service must look to new initiatives to handle back office functions, which will enable us to deliver greater resources to the front line of care. There are many functions within the hospital that we could look at. I believe that we will continue to develop and explore this module.
A statement from Intrum Justitia Management.
The management of Intrum Justitia Ireland believe that Brian Fitzgerald has been a major influence in the HSE taking the initiative at looking at outsourcing billing and collections.