Corvara Health Payments — Remittance Reconciliation

Everything here is fictional. Corvara Health Payments is an invented company and every
number in these files was made up for this example. Nothing in it comes from a real client.

The case

Corvara Health Payments processes patient and insurer payments for hospital groups —
$2.4B moved across 61 health systems last year. Finance has escalated that $38M of
remittance is sitting unmatched, some of it for more than 120 days, and nobody can say
where in the flow it stops. The candidate is interviewing for a Solutions Strategy role.

What the interviewer asked for

Ten to twelve slides covering four things: a picture of how a payment and its remittance
actually travel through the platform, showing where the two paths split and where failures
loop back; what the aging data says about whether the problem is getting better or worse,
with the reading set out beside the numbers rather than after them; which hop to fix first
and what it is worth; and what to do about two legacy health systems.

What the deck argues

Money and remittance travel two separate paths and only meet at one place — the match
service — and that is where the $38M sits. Every aging bucket grew month over month, so
the queue is accumulating rather than draining. 58% of failures come from a single cause:
the claim identifier on the remittance does not match the one on the funds line. That is
$22M of the $38M pile, fixable with one engineering change that applies to all 61 health
systems at once. The recommendation is to ship that fix first, defer the timing and
malformed-file categories to a later phase, and leave the two legacy systems in place
until the platform fix has done its work — because they benefit from it too.

What comes with it

The Excel model sizes the recommendation. It has three tabs: a summary comparing
current state against post-fix, a data tab that does the arithmetic, and an assumptions tab
where every input is listed with where it came from — and where an input was extrapolated
rather than given, it says so. The cells are live formulas, so changing an assumption
updates the answer.

The prep brief is the Word document you take into the room. It opens with the theory of
the case in a paragraph, then the headline numbers, the asks and concessions, and a set of
anticipated questions with an answer drafted for each — including the awkward ones, like
"you don't have a build cost, so how can you recommend spending on this?"