St. Joseph’s CFO discusses shift of 73 jobs from Syracuse to Midwest

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — The move by Livonia, Michigan–based Trinity Health to shift 73 St. Joseph’s Health billing jobs to Midwest locations resulted from patient concerns about the billing process.

Trinity Health, the parent organization of St. Joseph’s Health, has decided to use the EPIC system for the entire health system, says Meredith Price, chief financial officer at St. Joseph’s Health.

The reorganization focuses on changes to billing management which align with Livonia, Michigan–based Trinity Health’s “shift to a common, fully integrated health record, a transition that is already in progress,” according to a Trinity Health news release about the system’s reorganization.

“To prepare for that, and the efficiencies that that will afford us, one of the first steps is really going to be consolidating revenue-cycle functions into these consolidated patient-business centers,” says Price, who spoke with BJNN on Feb. 15.

Trinity Health plans to relocate all 73 patient-billing positions to one of three service centers in Columbus, Ohio; Kentwood, Michigan; and Farmington Hills, Michigan.

“EPIC will allow us to simplify that process and consolidate both physician bills and hospital bills into one,” she adds.

The affected jobs in Syracuse include 25 hospital-patient billing positions and 48 physician practice patient-billing jobs, St. Joseph’s Health said in a Feb. 6 email.

Trinity Health is offering relocation assistance to those employees who move, opportunities to transition to other jobs in their current locations, and, as a last resort, providing severance pay and outplacement services to those who end up leaving the system, per a St. Joseph’s Health release.

As of the Feb. 15 phone interview, Price says she isn’t aware of any St. Joseph’s employees who planned to relocate with their jobs.

St. Joseph’s Health has started a process of individual meetings with its human-resources department to find out if the affected employees want to transfer or perhaps fill another role at the local organization.

“We are looking to also understand from our colleagues where they may have other interests to be either retrained or repurposed within the health system,” says Price.

Besides the 73 billing positions, the effort also affects 40 information-technology (IT) positions at St. Joseph’s Health. Those people will be offered positions with the IT company Leidos (NYSE: LDOS) and will stay in Syracuse. Leidos, headquartered in Reston, Virginia, is Trinity Health’s application management services (AMS) vendor.

As Leidos employees, the IT workers will continue supporting Trinity Health’s current electronic-health record and revenue-cycle applications, which the organization is replacing with a single, common platform and its related applications.

The IT positions will transition to Leidos on May 1, per the release. The work of the billing positions will begin to transition no sooner than October, says Price.

“Colleagues, themselves, will likely be impacted subsequent to that,” she adds.

St. Joseph’s Health noted that these changes are not related to its “financial health,” adding that its clinical needs “continue to grow as St. Joseph’s Health grows across the region.”

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com