Becker's Hospital Review

15 CFO / FINANCE TeamHealth's ER billing scrutinized at Nashville General By Morgan Haefner T eamHealth sued 700 patients who were unable to pay for emergency room care they received at Nash- ville (Tenn.) General Hospital in 2019, but the phy- sician staffing firm said it has stopped the practice and is offering patients discounts, according to WPLN News. Southeastern Emergency Physicians, a group owned by Knoxville, Tenn.-based TeamHealth, has run Nashville Gen- eral's ER since 2016. Nashville General pays TeamHealth about $200,000 a month to provide care for indigent pa- tients. But TeamHealth continued to bill uninsured patients, and in some cases, took patients to court over unpaid ac- counts. Leaders of the board overseeing Nashville General said they didn't know TeamHealth was suing patients over un- paid balances. In 2019, TeamHealth sued 700 patients at Nashville General — as many patients as all other nearby hospitals and staffing firms combined, according to WPLN News. TeamHealth said in December that it is no longer suing patients, at Nashville General and at other hospitals, and is implementing discount programs. Frank Stevenson, who chairs the Nashville General board's finance committee, said even though the ER services are outsourced, the billing practices reflect on the hospital. "It's still under our umbrella. And so we have an expecta- tion to make sure we're monitoring, covering, and looking into all of those things that are associated with this hospi- tal," he told WPLN. n How 2 former debt collectors helped erase $1B in medical bills By Ayla Ellison C raig Antico and Jerry Ashton had decades of experience as medical debt collectors when they founded RIP Medical Debt in 2014. Since then, the nonprofit organization has helped eliminate medical debt for more than 500,000 people across the U.S. RIP raises funds from individual donors, philanthropists and organizations to pur- chase medical debt in bulk for pennies on the dollar. Once RIP buys debt, it is forgiven. Over the past five years, the organization has erased $1 billion in medical debt, including $65 million in debt owed by veterans. RIP works with credit data provider TransUnion to search bundled debt portfo- lios to find accounts for insolvent individuals who either have a household income that is two times or more below the federal poverty level or have medical debts of 5 percent or more of their gross annual income. When RIP buys and forgives debt, the person re- ceives a yellow envelope in the mail stating there are no tax consequences for the relief. A few years aer Mr. Antico and Mr. Ashton launched RIP, the nonprofit gained national attention for working with Last Week Tonight and its host John Oliver to forgive $15 mil- lion in medical debt. With the help of RIP, the show bought the debt for $60,000, or less than half a cent on the dollar. Mr. Antico and Mr. Ashton set the goal of erasing $1 billion in medical debt years ago when they were first dreaming up RIP. ough they're pleased to have hit that goal, they say there is a lot more work to do. "To have reached that summit is an in- credible accomplishment, but we also now see a much greater peak from this vantage point: billions more of un-payable medical debt burdening everyday Americans," the co-founders said in a press release. "Our work has just begun." n

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