CHICAGO – Resurrection Health Care of Chicago has signed an agreement to implement software that will help it deal with the federal government's Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) initiative.

Resurrection Health Care plans to use the RACPro Basic software solution from Alpharetta, Ga.-based vendor HealthPort. Resurrection Health Care is a not-for-profit Catholic organization that runs hospitals, nursing homes, retirement communities, home health services and behavioral health programs in the Chicago region.

Resurrection Health Care has been using HealthPort's Release of Information (ROI) service at a few of its facilities. The organization wanted to establish a consistent process for RAC tracking that could be integrated with a few of the organization's existing systems - including ROI.

The roll-out of RACPro Basic will take place in the coming months as the organization prepares for the permanent RAC program, which will begin January 1, 2010.

"From our perspective, the combination of HealthPort's ROI and RACPro Basic solved the need for all of our facilities to operate on a consistent solution that would foster organization, efficiency and effective use of technology to ensure that we are RAC-ready," said Martin Judd, vice president of professional services at Resurrection Health Care's Saints Mary and Elizabeth Medical Center and chair of the system's RAC Steering Council.

According to Dale Speer, HealthPort's regional director of hospital sales, RACPro Basic enables hospitals to store and view records, and to view the status of RAC requests and confirm which records were sent and when.

"Resurrection chose HealthPort based on their long-term relationship with our operations management team," said Speer. "Our technology allows immediate access to information in a time when RAC makes that more important than ever before."