Nemadji Research Corporation: Sustaining an Unparalleled Commitment to Community Service

It’s not often that people look to a town of 100 people for innovative business ideas. But the town of Bruno, Minn., located about an hour south of Duluth, Minn., is home to Nemadji Research Corporation, a company that is leading the way in local business and community service efforts. Nemadji, which takes its name from a nearby state forest, has an innovative business model, helping public hospitals collect unpaid Medicare and Medicaid claims. When a hospital admissions department spells a name incorrectly, enters the wrong Social Security number or errs on a birth date, a Medicare or Medicaid claim can be denied. Nemadji’s software searches thousands of hospital records each month to cross-reference them with federal medical eligibility records. When there’s a match, hospitals can collect on denied claims.

Beyond its groundbreaking business efforts, Nemadji is also making a name for the improvements it’s brought to the Bruno community. With its affiliates, the company employs 100, including 30 in its California offices. It is unique for a small town business in that it provides full-family health care benefits for all employees that work at least half-time. The average salary is about double the county average and no one makes less than $12 per hour once they’ve worked at Nemadji for three months.

“We pay wages that people can actually raise a family on,” said Gene Lourey, founder, Nemadji. The company also offers its employees onsite childcare and a nutrition center through two non-profits Nemadji helped to create. Both centers not only serve Nemadji's employees, but are open to members of the community as well.

In addition to its expansive employee benefits plan, Nemadji sets aside a portion of its profits to a community spending account that supports local businesses. Employees can use this money to buy locally produced services and products, such as wood, beef and produce. “Without Nemadji, Bruno would probably be just a gas station and a bar,” Lourey said. “There just wouldn’t be the jobs to sustain this many people. A lot of people around here would get by with next to nothing, no health care. But they’ve got to have health care.”

Lourey remembers a time when he lost his job and his health care benefits years ago. Since two of his children had special health needs, Lourey describes the time as the scariest in his life. Because of this experience, Lourey is committed to providing full benefits for his employees.

“Many people make career decisions just to have health care,” Lourey said. “That’s a loss of talent and it’s inefficient for our economy. We don’t want our employees to wonder how they will make it through financially.” Nemadji employees have no formal position titles and are able to schedule their work time around family and personal commitments. The firm’s small-town location helps save costs, which allows Nemadji to provide better benefits. To hire employees in Bruno, it costs Nemadji only 80 percent of what Nemadji’s California employees cost in salary and benefits. Nemadji’s strong benefits package also helps attract talented employees to the Bruno area, who might not otherwise have come to the small town.

“We’ve never had to place an ad for a job; people come to us,” Lourey said. “But we don’t think we’re doing anything special. We just try to do the right thing.”