The proposal
Each phase stands on its own. If Phase 1 does not earn its keep in ninety days, nothing further is owed and nothing structural has changed for TORCH or its members.
Roadmap
Days 0–90
Commercially: the network view is free to TORCH. Member access is priced at dues level — not as a capital project. No new legal entity — a one-page data-participation addendum to the existing vendor agreement.
Months 6–18
Commercially: the tools the CIN currently runs on spreadsheets and staff time, moved into the same isolated infrastructure the benchmarks already use.
18+ months
Commercially: the point at which the network can take real risk with its eyes open — and fund the transition partly with CMS money rather than member capital.
Guardrails
Antitrust counsel should find this dull. Five rules are built into the product, not promised in a slide.
Harsight never negotiates, brokers, or advises on a rate for any hospital or for the network. Every hospital contracts on its own, as it does today.
Members submit to a neutral vendor, never to each other. No member ever receives another member's identified data through UNITE.
Any published statistic is three months or older, drawn from at least five contributing hospitals, with no hospital contributing more than 25% of the figure.
Market rate intelligence is built from payer transparency files that are already public. Nothing in the market panel comes from another hospital's contract.
No joint venture, no new LLC, no ownership change, no governance change. A one-page data-participation addendum, reviewable by TORCH counsel.
The partnership
HARS and TORCH already operate a shared-services partnership: a four-party master agreement (TORCH, TMSI, Shared Services LLC, HARS) in which HARS manages a central billing office model for rural hospitals under TORCH-side governance. UNITE is designed to strengthen that arrangement — never to compete with it.
The member-owned network: payer contracting, covered lives, quality committees, governance. TORCH owns this lane entirely.
Advisory and the central billing office: RCM delivery, vendor curation and oversight, quarterly KPI reporting to the Governance Board. HARS runs this lane.
Benchmarks, payer scorecards, market rates: the evidence layer underneath both. Harsight runs this lane — and only this lane.
HARS reports quarterly performance to the CBO Governance Board. UNITE supplies denial rates, days in A/R, days-to-pay, and peer benchmarks as governed evidence — not staff-built spreadsheets.
The master agreement grants HARS the use of de-identified, aggregated data for benchmarking and pricing analysis. UNITE is that clause, implemented as product.
Every network statistic flows from advisor-verified, signed hospital data. HARS validation is the reason the numbers can be trusted — UNITE makes that work visible.
UNITE benchmarks surface the revenue-cycle gaps the CBO's bundled services fix; CBO results show up as measurable improvement in UNITE — the evidence behind the hospital rebate story.
The ask
Ninety minutes with TORCH leadership and the payer committee to test the concept against how the CIN actually operates.
Volunteer members already producing the files. The fifth hospital unlocks the first live benchmark — below five, nothing publishes.
TORCH counsel reviews the one-page data-participation addendum before any hospital submits anything.
Track Rural Health Transformation Program opportunities together, with evidence packs generated from data the members already send.