Can anyone tell me about UHC in chicago? (United Healthcare Consortium)

May 24, 2013 2:24 PM

Hi, UHC looks pretty interesting as a company. But I am having trouble grasping what the company does in reality (aside for all the marketing material on the website) and what is the REAL mission of this company. UHC is apparently an alliance of university medical center and affiliated hospitals website is www.uhc.edu Anyone in the know? or able to decode what is it they do? what is their role in the industry, .where they stand..etc.
posted by kirikara to Work & Money (2 answers total)

First, it's University HealthSystem Consortium. They're not related to UnitedHealthCare, who are an insurance company.

My impression is that they started out as a trade group for academic medical centers but are partway through evolving into an analytics-focused consulting firm that provides comparative benchmarking data and process improvement consulting services on things like revenue cycle and clinical quality performance, and especially supply chain management.

They have joint ownership (along with VHA, a similar organization that is focused on non-profit hospital in general, rather than AMCs specifically) of Novation, who are the largest hospital supply chain Group Purchasing Organization in the country, and they offer consulting services (and maybe also software?) to help their members implement procurement through Novation.
posted by strangely stunted trees at 2:54 PM on May 24, 2013

Response by poster: Interesting. I thought somehow through a bunch of subsidiaries they were related to United Healthcare group.
Thanks for your info. I will also look into VHA.

If anyone else has info, I am happy to hear anything you have..!
posted by kirikara at 8:46 AM on May 26, 2013