A year after flagging a spike in payer denials, Community Health Systems’ top executive says the situation has stabilized.
“It has really not gotten any worse,” Interim CEO Kevin Hammons said on the Franklin, Tenn.-based for-profit system’s Oct. 24 earnings call.
On CHS’ October 2024 call, Mr. Hammons said the system was making incremental investments in its centralized financial services processes and teams, as well as its physician advisor program to “continue to advocate for the appropriate classification of care for our patients and payment for the services our health systems provide.”
He said on the Oct. 24 call that CHS is also investing in AI tools, using a combination of third-party vendors as well as internally developed products for its revenue cycle team.
“I would say we’ve been able to kind of hold things stable, which would indicate that the payers are probably also denying more claims,” he said. “We’ve been better at overturning some of those denials in order to kind of keep things status quo.”
CHS reported an operating income of $243 million (7.9% margin) in the third quarter of 2025, a significant improvement over the $205 million operating loss (-6.6% margin) in the same quarter last year.
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