An initiative spearheaded by Rush University Medical Center, Fillmore Linen Service has grown steadily since it began operations in June 2024 with Rush as its foundational customer. Three other local hospitals had hired the launderer by the end of 2025, and Fillmore Linen expects customer demand to increase further this year. The business also expects to do additional hiring to meet that demand, bringing more jobs to Chicago’s West Side.
That outcome is a big part of what Rush leaders had in mind when they conceived the idea of creating a hospital laundry service in one of the neighborhoods near the medical center. The initiative was seen as a way both to spur job creation in the surrounding community and also to reduce the expense of continuing to use a laundry service in western Illinois.
Rush’s role in getting Fillmore Linen started is part of its commitment to leverage its purchasing power to boost its surrounding communities by doing business with vendors there. That commitment is part of Rush’s strategy to promote health equity in the medical center’s neighboring communities by removing barriers to health there. The commitment also includes Rush’s work with Concordance Healthcare Solutions, a medical supply distributor that serves all three Rush system hospitals and most of its clinics from a West Side warehouse.
Leading a change in linens
These partnerships are mutually beneficial, reducing Rush’s costs and environmental impact while increasing reliability and efficiency and supporting Rush’s excellence in patient care. While Rush was unsatisfied with its previous laundry service, “Fillmore’s been a huge success,” says Jeremy Strong, vice president, supply chain at Rush. “The service is great, they’re great to work with and partner with. It’s been nice going from having a problem to not even having to talk about it.”
The significance of Rush’s involvement with Fillmore Linen went beyond being the business’ first paying customer to providing reassurance to other hospitals that were contemplating following Rush’s lead. From bed sheets to bath towels to hospital gowns, linens are as easily taken for granted as they are essential to hospital care, which makes the prospect of changing a laundry vendor a daunting idea. “Most hospitals if it’s working won’t touch it,” says Cliff Barber, Fillmore Linen’s CEO.
“There’s no advantage in the world to be that supply chain person and go with a new laundry linen service first … and suddenly a nurse doesn’t have a sheet at the bedside,” concurs David Ansell, MD, senior vice president, community health equity, and Rush University’s associate provost, clinical affairs. “One of the roles that Rush could play was not only to invest but to de-risk for other businesses, letting others know it was okay.”
“They saw the potential economic and social benefits for the community,” Barber says. “You can’t say enough about Rush and being forward-thinking.”
Fillmore Linen currently employs 92 people at the building on Fillmore St. in the North Lawndale neighborhood that gives the business its name, including those who do laundry work plus supervisors and back-office staff. Those jobs are in high demand in North Lawndale — “because it’s overlooked, we have an endless supply” of people in the neighborhood who want to work for the company, Barber notes.
The performance of his current workforce makes him confident about future hiring from the community. “They give you higher productivity, there’s much lower turnover,” Barber says.
He welcomes eventual turnover though: Barber wants working at Fillmore Linen, which pays laundry workers $17 to $20 an hour, to be a launch pad to higher-paying jobs somewhere else after a few years. If it is, “the overall employment effect will be greater than the sheer [headcount] number,” he observes.
Fillmore Linen already is making a positive financial impact, both in North Lawndale and at Rush. MasterCard reports that sales in the area have risen 24%, and Strong says that Rush is saving $700,000 a year by using the business instead of its previous laundry service.
The partnership also is supporting Rush’s commitment to environmental sustainability. By switching to Fillmore Linen from a laundry an hour away, Rush has reduced transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions by 16,328 MTCO2e (metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, a measurement used for various greenhouse gases). It’s also reduced energy-related emissions by an additional 2,032 MTCO2e and saved 2.4 million gallons of water annually.
Using artificial intelligence to avoid supply shortages
About three miles southeast of Fillmore Linen Service, in the neighboring South Lawndale neighborhood (aka Little Village), a state-of-the-art, 175,000-square-foot warehouse stands as evidence of the success and longevity of Rush’s vendor partnerships. Replacing an outdated warehouse, Concordance Healthcare Solutions opened the facility in late 2019 as part of an agreement to be Rush’s medical supply distributor, which also included retaining the warehouse’s employees and hiring new workers mainly from the West Side.
The company, which employs 47 people in the facility, and Rush renewed their five-year contract in mid-2024. “It continues to work out,” Strong says. “We have less issues getting what we need when we need it.
“Having a distribution center close to us is nice,” he adds with a laugh. “We’ve used them when there’s a potential backorder and we have to bring in a bunch of extra stuff to get ahead of the game. We can put it there.” This practice, known as third-party logistics, or 3PL, is an additional aspect of the Rush-Concordance partnership that’s developed over time.
The warehouse also been an incubator of innovation. Rush was the first of Concordance’s clients to pilot Surgence, an AI-based tracking tool that anticipates order backlogs so the hospital can devise workarounds before running out of essential medical supplies.
“We can see everything that Rush uses on a day-to-day basis, and we can feed that information into our system so we know if they’re running low and we’re running low, and we can expedite,” says Lisa Hohman, Concordance’s CEO. Alternately, if the system identifies supplies that sitting on shelves too long, Surgence alerts Rush so they’re put to use.
Maintaining an adequate flow of medical supplies was an enormous challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains a serious concern as manufacturers struggle to maintain adequate supplies consistently. Surgence’s help makes responding to shortages “a lot less last-minute,” Strong says. “If you get ahead of it, you can make plans…to make sure patients, doctors and nurses have what they need.
“And it does save us money, it does reduce costs, because scarcity increases prices. You avoid that because you’re ahead of the game.” Even before Rush implemented Surgence, an analysis of the partnership with Concordance calculated it was reducing costs by $1 million a year.
Seeking new ventures and partners
Rush is continuing to explore ideas for bringing businesses to the West Side to create jobs while better meeting the health system’s needs. Among them are bringing together Chicago hospitals for joint ventures in the as-yet-unused space in the massive Fillmore Street building, which currently includes a coffee roaster and florist in addition to the laundry. A civic organization and a consultancy have been engaged to assess the viability of the ideas, which include collaborations on document logistics, food service, and other hospital necessities.
Leaders at Rush and their vendor partners express mutual admiration for what they’ve already accomplished together. “These successful businesses make a (profit) margin, they hire people, but they have a social mission as well. Doing well and doing good are not contradictory,” Ansell says.
“The leadership of Rush, their true purpose really is impacting the lives of in the communities they serve,” Hohman says. “It’s difficult to do, but they live it and breath it … and figure out how to get these things done.”
