Taking Shared Services to a New Level at a Healthcare Company

HospitalCo*, a leading hospital operator and healthcare provider, wanted to improve service and efficiency in its shared services center (SSC). We conducted a four-week diagnostic that identified opportunities to not only cut costs significantly, but dramatically improve patient experiences.

Four years after its launch, HospitalCo’s SSC had outgrown its original design. Problems included contested resources and informal service-level agreements. Meanwhile, HospitalCo faced significant headwinds from competition, tough negotiations with health funds, and a customer base turning away from private health insurance markets. Customers lacked awareness of its services, and managers encountered resistance to change from hospitals that were reluctant to cede control.

We mapped HospitalCo’s processes across functions and subfunctions, using interviews with management as well as benchmarking and digital-maturity assessments. Our approach also brought the voice of HospitalCo’s customers into the evaluations, through interviews and benchmarking of the customer experience.

We outlined a vision for a redesigned SSC, showing HospitalCo how to plug significant efficiency gaps in its finance, IT, legal and corporate governance departments. We demonstrated how automation could simplify the center’s payroll function and produce significant ROI through rapid gains in credit collection.

By standardizing practices in its IT function, HospitalCo could simultaneously redeploy talent and improve security. Across the SSC, we found ways to refocus employees and modernize processes and workflows. As a result, HospitalCo significantly reduced spending while creating new opportunities for employees and providing better services to internal customers and, ultimately, patients.