How a Potato-Field Hospital Turned Referral Leakage Into MRIs, Makos, and Better Care
Bingham Memorial sits in Blackfoot, Idaho (population: 12,000), but don't let the zip code fool you. They've got the newest MRI in the region, a Mako surgical robot, and the best mammogram imaging in eastern Idaho. Where did the budget come from? Referrals they were already losing.
Zac Rice discovered that 45% of Bingham's internal referrals were leaking to competitors, often for reasons as simple as a new hire not knowing they had a neurologist on staff. His team attacked the problem operationally first: built tracking in Meditech ARM, ranked providers by leakage, and ran education loops until that number dropped to 26%. The result was $2.5 million per quarter in recovered surgical charges.
Then came the question every health system faces: how do you scale that and keep going? That's where Luma came in. Bingham is now using Fax Transform to convert paper referrals into schedulable data, automated text outreach to get patients on the calendar the moment a referral is placed, and Snowflake-powered dashboards to track service recovery in real time. Next up: outbound agentic voice ("Betty from Bingham") to close the loop on recalls, screenings, and medication management.
In this episode, Zac walks through the full arc: how you find the leak, fix it with people and process, then partner with the right technology to turn a one-time win into a compounding system that funds MRIs, robots, and better care for a rural community.