Case Study

Empowering Service Line Growth: NAH’s Approach to Urgent Care Expansion with Trek Health

Northern Arizona Healthcare (NAH) used Trek Health’s Transparency Platform to benchmark urgent care reimbursement and build a data-driven rate strategy for three new urgent care centers across its rural Arizona service area.

  • Organization: Northern Arizona Healthcare (NAH)
  • Location: Northern Arizona
  • Type: Regional, Rural Health System
  • Use Case: Service Line Expansion
  • Service Line Focus: Urgent Care
  • Trek Solutions: Transparency Platform, Price Intelligence

Impact

NAH Expands Urgent Care Footprint With Three New Centers

By implementing Trek Health's provider-centric Price Intelligence solution, NAH secured robust market benchmarks and tailored insights into its competitors, empowering the organization with the strategic confidence to broaden its urgent care presence by adding three new facilities.

Trek Health gave NAH the clarity and confidence needed to launch and scale a new urgent care service line. With reliable market benchmarks and actionable insights, NAH accelerated decision-making and strengthened its long-term growth strategy.

  • Used market-based price intelligence to benchmark urgent care reimbursement across Flagstaff and surrounding markets, enabling confident rate setting and service line expansion.
  • Strengthened executive and board alignment by providing clear, competitor-specific insights that justified rate targets and accelerated service line decisions.
  • Enabled confident expansion into two new urgent care centers using validated market benchmarks, with a third location advancing toward launch.

‍

Working with Trek Health has been an absolute pleasure. From the very beginning, they demonstrated professionalism, clear communication, and a genuine commitment to delivering quality. Every project we've worked on together has been completed on time, with attention to detail that consistently exceeds expectations. It's rare to find a team that combines expertise with such a friendly, approachable attitude.

—

Vice President of Managed Care at Northern Arizona Healthcare

Challenge

Traditional benchmarking tools offered limited insight into reimbursement rates in the area, and price transparency regulations complicated data clarity.

NAH, a rural health system serving Flagstaff and the Verde Valley, aimed to launch three new urgent care centers with competitive yet sustainable rates. NAH needed a method to understand urgent care reimbursement
across Arizona and similar markets to enter payer discussions with realistic,
data-driven proposals.

  • Across all major commercial payers, isolated markets receive the lowest reimbursement for the same CPT codes.  
  • Without visibility into payer disparities, isolated providers leave up to 30–80% more reimbursement on the table.
  • With 86% of Arizona emergency providers operating in urban markets, rural providers are at a disadvantage in payer negotiations.

Solution

Price Intelligence converts complex TiC rate files into clear, validated insights that strengthen payer negotiations, surface underpayments, and guide strategic financial decisions.

NAH evaluated multiple price transparency vendors, initially shortlisting several vendors and ultimately narrowing the list to two finalists. Although competitors were more known nationally, Trek Health’s Price Intelligence solution was selected based on a combination of provider-only focus, quality of reimbursement data, partnership approach, and overall value.

Built for managed care, finance, and contracting leaders, it delivers market benchmarks and provider-level visibility that help organizations optimize reimbursement and protect margins across service lines.

‍Solutions leveraged

  • Benchmark Report
  • Rate Research
  • Group Rate Research
  • Rate Change
  • Competitor Analysis
  • Query Builder
  • Competitive Market Analysis (CMA)

Looking Ahead

NAH is in its early stages with Trek and plans to deepen its use of transparency data across additional negotiations, including comparisons with other rural systems.

The team is exploring broader use of Trek’s analytics tools for hospitals, ASCs, and provider groups, and is considering a pilot of Trek’s Contract Intelligence capabilities to bring payer policies and contract terms into the same decision-making lens as market benchmarks.

By extending Trek across more service lines and contract types, NAH aims to further strengthen its negotiation readiness, protect margins, and give leadership a consistent view of how its reimbursement performance compares to peers.