Alan Ulrich named CFO at Alaska's Bartlett Regional Hospital
City-owned healthcare facilty was recently damaged by arson.
Alan Ulrich, Juneau, Alaska-based Bartlett Regional Hospital's new CFO.
Juneau, Alaska-based Bartlett Regional Hospital recently named Alan Ulrich its new chief financial officer.
Ulrich was previously the CFO at Guam Memorial Hospital, where he held that position since December 2012, dealing with issues including a significant operating deficit.
GMH, a 169-bed acute care hospital, is the only civilian hospital on the American territory of 180,000 people. Upon arriving on the Pacific island, Ulrich said he inherited a $1.9 million deficit due to a glitch in billing software that neglected to bill patients and insurance companies (including Medicaid) for medication for nearly a year, according to a recent article in the Juneau Empire.
He said that because of the glitch, filing deadlines for reimbursement claims lapsed and the hospital couldn’t collect any of the debt. As a result, Ulrich spent much of his time at GMH trying to dig the hospital out of debt while serving a community heavily reliant on charity care, he said.
Before leaving GMH, Ulrich helped convert that hospital’s revenue cycle software to a new operating system, eliminating “paper chase” between departments, GMH administrator Joseph Vergas told the Marianas Variety, the local and regional newspaper based in Guam.
“After I arrived, (Vergas) told me that I should work as if I’m starting from scratch,” Ulrich said. “It’s really difficult to build a hospital’s fiscal infrastructure from scratch. Working with the managers and staff, GMH has made gains in the two years I’ve been here.”
Juneau, however, presents its own issues as well.
Ulrich arrived on Nov. 19 to find a hospital covered in plastic after a fire, believed to be caused by arson on Nov. 7, resulted in $100,000 damage.
And, at the end of 2013, three of the city-owned hospital’s four executives submitted their resignations within three months of one another, leaving the hospital with nearly $300,000 in severance payouts.
The hospital is also working to go paper-free with the implementation of an electronic medical records system, making the hospital more efficient and improving the quality of patient care.
Ulrich was selected from about 60 applicants and has committed to staying at the Alaska hospital indefinitely, according to Bartlett CEO Chuck Bill, who himself was just hired in May.
“I have a sort of wanderlust if you will. Working in different places, different industries … I can see how patient encounters lead to revenue streams,” Ulrich said in the Juneau Empire.
Before his work at GMH, he was the interim CFO at Gila River Health in Arizona and has held CFO positions in California and Hawaii, according to a recent statement from Bartlett. He has worked in healthcare finance since the early 1980s.
