Straight talk. New approaches in healthcare. Enterprise-wide collaboration is key to successful reengineering.

When employees from clinical operations, process improvement, finance and health information management join forces with physicians to reengineer processes, they wind up with a successful project. That's what executives at Kaleida Health in Buffalo, N.Y. learned when they redesigned the revenue cycle with a focus on coding and documentation practices, leading to an increase in revenues. In this installment of Straight Talk, we look at the reengineering efforts of the five-hospital system, which catapulted from a $62 million loss in 2001 to a $2 million surplus in 2003. Modern Healthcare and PricewaterhouseCoopers present Straight Talk. The session on enterprise-wide collaboration was held on May 11, 2004 at Modern Healthcare's Chicago headquarters. Charles S. Lauer, publisher of Modern Healthcare, was the moderator.