Strategic Partnerships in Healthcare: The Making of a State-of-the-Art Children’s Hospital

In January 2020, Intermountain Health embarked on a journey to expand its Primary Children’s Hospital network by establishing a second campus. The goal was to expand Intermountain’s pediatric footprint in the rapidly growing suburb of Lehi, ensuring families would have access to high-quality pediatric care in a facility close to home.

After four years of careful planning, the Primary Children’s Miller Campus in Lehi opened its doors to patients. The five-story, 66-bed, state-of-the-art facility provides pediatric trauma and emergency services, behavioral health, intensive care and surgical and clinic services.

Strategic early involvement of key partners

Long before the doors opened in February 2024, Intermountain leaders understood the complexities and challenges of building a large-scale specialty hospital and knew detailed planning was paramount to the project’s success. Intermountain assembled a comprehensive project team consisting of integral partners to support the overall initiative and ensure the new hospital was ready on day one. This team included internal operations, external strategic partners and technical experts to ensure overall success.

As Intermountain’s dedicated revenue cycle partner, R1 was proud to be part of the project team to ensure the RCM systems, processes and workstream would be seamlessly integrated and fully operational well before the hospital opened.

Ensuring RCM success from planning to go-live

The early engagement of R1 allowed Intermountain to establish a robust RCM workstream that was ready to operate efficiently at the hospital’s opening. R1’s key preparatory RCM components included establishing a revenue cycle workstream among impacted operational areas, managing technical changes to multiple systems and evaluating and implementing requests for operational standardization.

Key preparations included:  

• Staffing, training and onboarding: The project team focused on staffing, training and onboarding personnel in patient-facing areas such as registration, financial counseling and health information management (HIM). Intermountain and R1 applied best practice staffing models and training programs to ensure Primary Children’s Miller Campus was staffed to provide the best patient experience.   

• Acquisition of patient-facing technology: The project team ensured that all necessary patient-facing hardware was acquired and operational for multiple hospital departments, including the main admitting area, imaging and surgery. This initiative ensured a seamless and consistent experience throughout the facility.  

• Revenue integrity and charge services: In the first months after the hospital’s opening, R1’s revenue integrity and charge services teams worked collaboratively with key Intermountain leadership to ensure accurate charge capture, posting and billing. This proactively helped to safeguard against revenue leakage that is common during a new facility’s opening.    

Tech enablement leads to shared source of truth

In addition to revenue cycle workstream preparations, IT optimization and enablement was a heavy focus prior to the hospital’s opening. The R1 team managed technical changes to R1 systems to support new hospital services and implemented bidirectional interfaces for seamless data flow and information sharing. This work involved close coordination between the Intermountain and R1 IT teams, including defining exact host system requirements, performing quality assurance testing and troubleshooting data issues. This work ensured that all account data crossed the systems accurately.  

R1 also provided hardware onsite and coordinated with Intermountain to whitelist these devices on the client’s network, assisting patients in registration and arrival activities.