Case Study: Heartland Health Center achieves nearly 50% reduction in days in AR and improved revenue capture with NextGen Healthcare

Growing Pains of Transforming Vision into Reality

Heartland Health Center is a federally qualified health center in Grand Island, Nebraska, providing medical, dental, and behavioral care to underserved individuals and families. Founded to improve health outcomes across Central Nebraska, the center struggled in its early years with limited billing resources, slow payment posting (sometimes taking up to a year), and revenue leakage from denials — all of which threatened operations under a tight budget.

In October 2017 Heartland partnered with NextGen Healthcare, implementing NextGen Enterprise, Financial Analytics and RCM support to run provider-level reports, apply claim edits, and shore up billing processes. The work cleaned up annual AR from nearly $1M to under $400K, cut days in AR from about 92 to roughly 30 (an almost 50% reduction), and produced increases in patients, payments and encounters — enabling investment in new providers, a quick-care clinic, equipment and expanded health education.

Heartland Health Center

Dustin Frey

Financial Director