TRINITY HEALTH INTERVIEW
On August 16, 2010, InsideCounsel Magazine Custom Media Editor, Scott Gawlicki, interviewed Diane Birell, Business Manager of Legal Services, at Trinity Health to discuss the significant cost-savings and improved visibility they’ve achieved to date, along with their vision to extend Collaborative Accountability Applications.
Controlling Costs and Limiting Liability with Unified Operations
SCOTT GAWLICKI:
Are you looking for a unified matter management and e-billing system? Would you like a modular system, one that lets you add functions if and when your data management needs change? And would you be interested in a hosted solution, one in which all the IT requirements are the vendor’s responsibility not yours? Today’s corporate legal departments need a process automation platform that meets all their needs, not just today but in the years to come. That’s why many are turning to Mitratech TeamConnect. My name is Scott Gawlicki and I’m a Custom Media Editor with Inside Counsel Magazine.
To learn more about Mitratech TeamConnect we’re talking to Diane Birrell, Business Manager of Legal Services with Michigan-based Trinity Health. Thanks for joining us today.
DIANE BIRRELL:
Thank you. I’m happy to be here.
SCOTT GAWLICKI:
Why did you want a combined e-Billing and matter management system?
DIANE BIRRELL:
We wanted a complete package. We have 30 in-house lawyers and hospitals in 9 states, 19 of them are located at the hospitals and the other 11 are in our home office. So we wanted a Web-based system that would allow all of our attorneys to share documents and collaborate on projects. And we also wanted the e-billing system to be part of it.
SCOTT GAWLICKI:
Now, you already had an e-Billing system in place correct?
DIANE BIRRELL:
Yes, but it was way too expensive and we couldn’t use it as a collaborative tool. We basically had an outside firm that reviewed our bills manually to make sure law firms adhered to our billing guidelines. But all we could do was view the invoices from the Web and either approve or disapprove them.
SCOTT GAWLICKI:
Was switching over to TeamConnect e-Billing difficult and what were some of the benefits?
DIANE BIRRELL:
The switch was relatively simple. We have 47 law firms now working for us and most of them already have experience with e-billing and quite a few used TeamConnect e-billing with other clients. We started a year ago and we’re close to having 100% of our firms billing electronically. As for the benefits we’re saving from $300,000 to $350,000 a year over our previous vendor. Plus, TeamConnect gives us reporting capabilities we’ve never had before. For example, with the old vendor if we wanted a report on how much was spent to date on a certain matter we had to wait weeks for them to run it. With TeamConnect, the invoices are fed directly into the matter management system. We can assemble that part of the report in a matter of minutes. We can examine our spend by matter, by law firm or by practice area. You can basically slice and dice it anyway you want. It was a big step up for us.
SCOTT GAWLICKI:
How about the matter management solution…How did that go?
DIANE BIRRELL:
Implementing e-Billing was a fairly quick response. We’re moving a little bit more slowly with matter management. Most of that is because we’re making organizational changes internally but we’ve gotten some of the basics in place. For example, in some hospitals the in-house counsel reports to the CEO not our general counsel. And until recently, the hospital would choose the law firm and assign the matter and corporate legal paid the bill. Now everything goes through TeamConnect. We open the matter, we choose the law firm and the electronic invoices come directly to us. Everything is done through the same centralized database. We’re not a unified department yet but that’s where we’re heading. We have a new general counsel who sees TeamConnect as playing a key role in that. It’s going to help bring everyone and everything together.
SCOTT GAWLICKI:
Are you considering any TeamConnect modules at this point?
DIANE BIRRELL:
We’re actually looking at several. First up is the Executive Dashboard. That will allow our general counsel or a hospital CEO to see exactly what will be spent on legal fees at each facility or what was spent on a matter related to that facility to date. We want to be able to examine and compare all of our expenses by hospital, by matter or by law firm if necessary. We’re also considering the GRC and SOP modules. We actually have the Corporate Secretary module and we’ll be implementing it soon after hiring a paralegal, as all of our corporate secretary records are still on paper and we’d like to digitize them and place them within the TeamConnect database. We’re interested in the GRC module to track all of our policies system-wide to improve the workflow, approval and change management process currently in place. The SOP manager would streamline and consolidate, service of process and help us make sure legal notices are processed immediately and automatically routed to the right in-house counsel.
SCOTT GAWLICKI:
As I understand it other departments want to use the system as well?
DIANE BIRRELL:
Yes, our Revenue Management department is currently implementing TeamConnect to electronically store and access all of their insurance payer contracts. They had successfully integrated TeamConnect with another software product used to track reimbursement rates also. That’s another thing we liked about the TeamConnect platform. It’s relatively easy to tie into Trinity’s other systems and databases. Again, we see TeamConnect as helping us collaborate both within the legal department and with the company as a whole.
SCOTT GAWLICKI:
You also chose the hosted model called Software as a Service, or SaaS, which allows you to avoid the time and cost of placing TeamConnect on your corporate server. Why was that important?
DIANE BIRRELL:
We’re a big organization. We have almost 50,000 employees, 44 hospitals and hundreds of other healthcare facilities in nine states. As you can imagine, we have a huge IT department. But compared to the rest of the organization, Legal’s a relatively small department. I felt we wouldn’t be able to get the level of IT support we would need. With the SaaS model, Mitratech takes care of everything: security, software updates and adding new users. And it’s a Web-based system so our attorneys can access it at work or at home without having to deal with a VPN or some other connection. It made the whole process of moving to e-Billing and matter management that much easier and much faster.
SCOTT GAWLICKI:
Diane, thanks for filling us in about this. We hope our audience found this conversation interesting and useful. This is Scott Gawlicki signing off for Inside Counsel Custom Media and Mitratech.