Michael Saunders

Michael has more than 10 years of experience driving operational and financial improvements in the healthcare revenue cycle environment. His expertise spans all areas of the revenue cycle, including patient access, financial clearance, billing, collections and denials management.

About Michael

Michael has worked in both consulting and interim leadership roles in multiple provider settings, including academic medical centers, multifacility health systems, and small- and medium-sized community hospitals. Throughout his career, he has:

• Directed a revenue cycle performance improvement engagement for a $275 million hospital in Louisiana, where he implemented process improvements resulting in more than $1.2 million in increased cash collections through decreases in bad debt and administrative write-offs.
• Led a performance improvement engagement for a $56 million community hospital in Hawaii, resulting in more than $9 million in benefits to the organization in the areas of revenue cycle, clinical documentation improvement, labor and nonlabor.
• Led a revenue cycle performance improvement engagement for an $86 million hospital in the Northeast, resulting in revenue cycle benefits of more than $10 million as well as additional benefits to the organization of more than $7 million in the areas of clinical documentation improvement, labor, nonlabor and clinical operations.
• Served in an interim leadership role for a large, national healthcare system, designing, establishing and deploying a new revenue cycle support team responsible for training and continuous performance improvement initiatives across 50-plus hospital facilities.
• Led a performance improvement engagement for a $43 million community hospital in rural Hawaii, resulting in more than $5 million in benefits to the organization in the areas of revenue cycle, clinical documentation improvement, labor and nonlabor.
• Led the revenue cycle component of a health information system (HIS) conversion engagement for an academic medical center, resulting in $35 million in increased year-over-year cash collections.

Prior to joining Huron, Michael worked in the nonprofit sector, providing nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations, development organizations and local governments with management solutions that enabled them to better serve their target communities. Prior to earning his graduate degree, Michael lived in Beijing, China, doing marketing and outreach for an organization focused on promoting cleaner development mechanisms within the Chinese business community.

Michael is a member of the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) and was a guest speaker at the November 2015 North Dakota HFMA Revenue Cycle Conference.

Michael holds a master’s degree in international affairs economics from the University of California, San Diego and a Bachelor of Science in international relations and Mandarin from Colgate University.