HCA, owner of 182 hospitals and 94 surgery centers including Sunrise, MountainView and Southern Hills hospitals in Las Vegas, will close its billing office on Decatur Boulevard and lay off about 500 workers, company officials said.

The workers performed back-office functions such as billing, patient accounting, collections and insurance claims processing for 17 hospitals in six Western states, including Nevada.

The workload from HCA's regional patient account service center in Las Vegas will be distributed to other back-office centers in the company. Services will begin to move in March and the transition is expected to close by the end of April.

HCA officials said the same functions will continue, simply in a different location, so there will be no effect on local hospitals or patients.

The move is part of a corporate decision by the Nashville, Tenn.-based health care company to consolidate its operations.

"With the rising costs of health care, we are expected to find ways to reduce costs and be more efficient," said Francee Cote, chief executive officer of the Las Vegas center. "Further consolidation of accounting functions allows us to focus more on delivering care and less on duplicating back-office work. This consolidation creates economies of scale. With technology advancements, it is now possible to handle the complex paperwork of hospital reimbursements from fewer physical locations."

The development of patient account service centers began in 2000 when HCA first consolidated many financial functions typically performed at every hospital into 10 centers. The Las Vegas closure is a continuation of that process, Cote said.

Employees will receive severance pay ranging from four weeks to more than two months of their current pay. The company will pay retention bonuses of 20 percent of annual pay to those who stay until their jobs are finished.

HCA will offer employees outplacement assistance through company resources and a professional outplacement firm. Employees from the Las Vegas center also will be given preference to interview for positions at other HCA locations.

Somer Hollingsworth, chief executive officer of the Nevada Development Authority, said it's unfortunate that HCA chose to close the Las Vegas location, but he understands that it's purely a business decision.

"We brought them here four or five years ago," he said. "They've just got excess capacity all over the country and this is one of the places they shut down. They're not going offshore. They're consolidating. We were on the phone for 45 minutes and they told me they love Las Vegas. They've invested a lot of money here, so that's a good side."

HCA has contributed to the local economy and health care industry by investing $330 million in the new Southern Hills Hospital, an expanded Sunrise Children's Hospital, medical equipment and recruitment of staff and physicians over the last few years.

Hollingsworth noted that the accounting center, formerly a Montgomery Ward department store, is a separate division from HCA's hospital, outpatient surgical and imaging center operations in Las Vegas.

Earlier this month, HCA completed a merger in which it was acquired by a private investor group of affiliates of Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity, HCA founder Thomas Frist and HCA management. The transaction is valued at about $33 billion, including assumption of $11.7 billion of debt.

Las Vegas has lost thousands of call-center jobs with the closing of HCA and before that MicroAge and American Airlines. But Hollingsworth said those job losses were offset by job additions from newly arriving companies such as Zappos.com, which employs more than 400 people.

The valley has also seen growth in the biotechnology and life science sectors, he said.

"There's a lot revolving around medical. That's starting to grow and they're high-paying jobs with good benefits," he said. "Sometimes we're seeing not pure call centers, but back-office combinations."

Hollingsworth estimated that call centers employ about 10,000 people in Las Vegas.

CitiBank, with 2,000 employees, was one of the first. Others that have located operations in Las Vegas include AAA Nevada, USA Group, Williams-Sonoma, Sunterra Corp., Marin Credit Card, Softbank Service Group, Household Bank and Edison Enterprise.