Healthcare providers are getting pretty good at creating budgets and comparing financial results vs. budgets but just how realistic are these budgets in the first place? Too often enterprise budgets are created with limited insight into the operational data needed to create an accurate picture of the business drivers that affect the financials. This is partially due to the typically siloed information architecture and sometimes lacking staff / skillsets that are available. The idea of building these integrations so that budgets can be more realistic creates visions of battles over “my data” and big $$$ signs.
The good news though is that options exist! Oracle Hyperion Planning comes pre-packaged within a platform that easily integrates with both financial and operational data using pre-packaged tools and in some cases pre-packaged integration as depicted below:
Each data element that is relevant to the budget can be built with a defined level of detail that is warranted by the domain area requirement and the emphasis on drilling back into the detail for analysis purposes. Budgets built with this attention to operational data become much more meaningful when it comes to upstream / downstream revenue drivers and ratios that are important to understand performance. Also, these data dimensions are vital to derive true profitability or fully loaded costs of programs, service lines and more.
Perficient has built multiple planning environments with integration to patient accounting systems such as EPIC, GE or Meditech. This same approach can be incorporated into costing models to determine cost assignment to charge code, encounter or patient levels based on cost classifications such as fixed vs. variable, direct vs. indirect and labor vs. non-labor.
Perficient has an excellent track record for implementing such Oracle EPM solutions for multiple large provider organizations such as Texas Children’s Hospital, The University of Texas Health Science Center and Christus Health.
