HFMA President and CEO Joe Fifer told healthcare finance professionals last week at ANI: The HFMA National Institute. “People want to know why health care costs what it does and what we’re doing about it,” Fifer said. “We need to move beyond the rhetoric.”1 Fifer went on to say that consumers are fed up with rising healthcare costs, and healthcare spending has played a large role in busting state and federal budgets. Between 2012 and 2013, the number of employers emphasizing value-based plans more than doubled. Today, accountable care organizations care for 10 percent of Americans.
Payers and Providers must look for efficiencies in all aspects of care and operations. Using technology is one way to make these shifts, specifically, revolutionizing your Decision Support System. Decision support systems are something businesses take for granted. We must now transform these systems to leverage clinical and financial / administrative data to create transparent costing models that tell us about profitability across service lines, patients and encounters. Those few organizations that are able to transform data to information to decisions and then harness the power of insightful and timely analytics have been differentiated in the market. Having data doesn’t itself make a company successful; organizations must act on information and filter what is useful, appropriate and above all else, actionable.
Oracle has positioned its solutions to ask and answer both administrative and operational questions with the Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) and Oracle Enterprise Health Analytics (EHA) solutions. HPCM is geared towards administrative areas and comes with the power and engine of Essbase. Using this tier one analytic engine, Essbase, coupled with key patient care data points, can bring powerful capacity planning to fruition. Patient volumes, outcomes and operational measures are not viewed in an independent environment. But when coupled with the financial and administrative data as they are dependencies to understanding case mix index, reasons for readmissions, and staffing mix (on a case level), among other things.
Having worked with hospital costing systems for years in a large Academic Medical Center, I couldn’t be more excited about the new Hyperion Profitability and Costing solution. HPCM can help provide transparency to challenges such as trends in cost vs. operations by specialty, by department, by service line, by specialty or profitability by service or specialty by leveraging both financial and operational data across multiple scenarios and models. Perficient offers design, implementation and support capabilities for HPCM as well as budget and planning, strategic planning and financial close and other EPM solutions.
View “A Profitability and Cost Management Strategy for Healthcare Providers” on-demand webinar at
Download “A Solution to the “Signal to Noise” Problem for Healthcare Organizations” whitepaper at http://www.perficient.com/Thought-Leadership/White-Papers/2013/Oracle-Hyperion-Profitability-and-Cost
