As Rob Allen approaches the end of his first year as senior vice president and COO of Intermountain Healthcare, he says he is pleased with the direction of the Salt Lake City-based system, including its partnership with revenue cycle management services provider R1 RCM.
Intermountain announced Jan. 24 it would transfer approximately 2,300 nonclinical employees to R1. The transfer, effective April 8, is projected to save Intermountain roughly $70 million during the next three years. As part of its relationship with R1, Intermountain also acquired a $20 million stake in the company.
Mr. Allen, who previously served as Intermountain's vice president of clinical and outreach services, recently spoke with Becker's Hospital Review about his new COO role and the system's partnership with R1.
Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What has it been like transitioning to COO?
Rob Allen: In general, I would characterize it as an opportunity I'm grateful for, an organization that I've come to love over time, and a group of people throughout the organization who are as or more mission driven than any organization I know. I, like so many employees at Intermountain Healthcare, love the mission we have, and it drives me every day like it drives our teams to do everything we can to serve our communities well and assure we are taking care of people who count on us. It's been a great year, and I've enjoyed it very much.
Q: Have you encountered any challenges so far?
RA: I think the main challenge we face is similar to many other healthcare organizations as we look to the future. For Intermountain, it becomes targeted. We were charged in 1975 by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which donated the hospitals to the system and created Intermountain Healthcare as a community asset to be a model system. And over this last year, probably the biggest challenge is just focusing on what does that really mean in the future. Intermountain and those who have gone before in this organization have done … a fantastic job of building, of serving, of assuring value in our community. As we and our leadership team look forward, how do we take the next step in that evolution to assure we're the model system of the future.
Q: What prompted the R1 transfer?
RA: We've had a relationship with R1 for the last six years. We've had over 30 people from R1 embedded in our operations, so the relationship with them has been an evolution. As we've looked at what the future holds, we came to realize this was an area that R1 could bring additional expertise to the table — gain efficiencies in ways that would help us lower the cost curve for the communities we serve. [Intermountain] saw some additional synergies with R1 with them establishing a center of work here in Salt Lake City. They could bring additional books of business here that would shore up opportunity for our employees and bring hundreds of new jobs to the state of Utah in addition to our employees who would join with them. So it stacked up really well as we were assessing what opportunities were here that might fit with our mission and our focus going forward to continue to deliver quality in service and also find ways to be more affordable. The stars aligned … in this for us in a real meaningful way to say we can for our community save $70 million over the next three years. We can assure that our employees have jobs at their current rates of pay here in our community, have a structure where they'll continue to be our partners working closely with us, and in many ways still be part of the team with Intermountain.
Q: What are the next steps with the transfer?
RA: As you can imagine for an announcement like this with 2,300 individuals, there's a lot of questions. We're very grateful we can come into this and give them some levels of assurance on some key things — you have a job, that job will be at the same rate of pay, your tenure with Intermountain carries over where you are, your current insurance product … will be offered as part of the benefit offering form R1. We've been able to answer a number of those questions, but there are a number of others. Over the next two months as we transition and get into that new partnership and structure with R1, we'll be working to hold forums with employees to answer additional questions they have. R1 will [also] be working to do some on-boarding with them and integrate them in the R1 system. The work of continuing forward and gaining the efficiencies and implementing the R1 processes further will be the after-transition piece, and lastly, the further work to assure the partnership is working really well and that our employees in that new partnership are connected and continuing to serve well on their teams.
Q: What other future goals does Intermountain have?
RA: We have one goal: to deliver on helping people live the healthiest lives possible. All our work is built around that. We will continue our work in transforming ourselves to focus our workstreams around our patients and the communities we serve. Our continued efforts will be to find where we have additional opportunities to improve in the quality and service and affordability in what we provide.
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