Approximately 1,650 Trinity Health employees will see their current positions offshored or outsourced in the coming years as the system moves to the Epic electronic health records platform.
The nonprofit Healthcare plans to relocate some of its revenue cycle employees to three consolidated billing offices in Michigan and Ohio and to outsource some of its information technology employees to its service provider. application management, Leidos.
The changes coincide with Trinity’s implementation of Epic, which is expected to run through 2022, with the system’s first hospital going live in Michigan in January 2020.
“It’s not imminent,” said Cynthia Fry, Trinity’s recipe manager. “It’s a space trip of the income cycle.”
As part of the change, 1,200 of Trinity’s revenue cycle employees who are not located in Michigan and Ohio and who focus on back office functions such as billing, collection and tracking will be invited to relocate to newly consolidated patient billing centers in Kentwood, Mich., Farmington Hills, Michigan and Columbus, Ohio. Trinity chose these cities after taking into account the location of its hospitals, property costs, average salaries and the cost of living. The health system will cover the moving costs of the employees.
The change does not affect revenue cycle employees who work in areas such as recording, coding, and improving clinical documentation.
Employees who do not want to relocate will be eligible to retrain for other positions within the healthcare system or with its suppliers, Fry said. Trinity will create new jobs in performance management and training. It will also offer severance packages and outplacement services, such as career counseling and resume development for those who decide not to move.
“I want them to find a place that suits them and matters to them, whether it’s doing something different within Trinity, helping them find something within Trinity, or moving and supporting our new centers, ”Fry said.
Another 445 Trinity employees who work in information technology will be invited to work at Leidos which offers the same salary and similar benefits. That’s because these employees work in a suite of apps that will shut down in a few years once the system goes live with Epic, said Marcus Shipley, CIO of Trinity.
Once with Leidos, those employees will likely work on other Leidos accounts, which could result in travel, Shipley said.
“These colleagues have developed and honed great skills over the years, and I have no doubts that Leidos is the partner who will help them to implement this in the long term,” he said.
Trinity has not disclosed how much its implementation of Epic will cost, but Shipley said none of the changes announced on Wednesday were happening for financial reasons. He said the partnership with Leidos allows Trinity to secure long-term future employment for employees whose applications will ultimately be closed. He said he did not believe the number of employees contracted out to Leidos would exceed 445.
Relevant Trinity IT employees will be working both at Trinity’s facilities and at home, Shipley said, adding that many of them were already working remotely, “so I think that’s something. in which they will fit well “.
