We have all witnessed the great impact healthcare reform has had on the healthcare industry. The landscape is changing so quickly it can be overwhelming for everyone involved. The new environment is more competitive and complex than ever and consumers are now in the driver’s seat. I say consumers because lets face it healthcare patients aren’t patients anymore, they are consumers and we must treat them that way.
With information at their fingertips, healthcare consumers are utilizing their retail experience, tapping all of their resources and doing their research before making decisions about their care. Healthcare organizations are in a tough spot, reimbursement is being squeezed, margins are eroding and consumers are smarter. Organizations have two options – raise their costs and put a band-aid over the gushing wound or take steps to truly understand their costs and fix them.
Lets look at the first option – raising their costs. Keep in mind healthcare consumers are smarter, they are “shopping” around to find the best deals and they understand a procedure that costs more doesn’t necessarily mean the outcome will be better. In the competitive healthcare industry raising costs will result in lost market share, probably not the best option for healthcare organizations that want to be around long-term.
The second option – understanding costs. More times than not healthcare organizations do not understand their costs. Much like healthcare consumers, organizations have access to mountains of data but often times their information is located in disconnected silos making it very challenging to connect the dots. Understanding costs requires healthcare organizations to leverage clinical and financial data to make data-driven business decisions.
How do organizations understand their costs when they are dealing with a disparate system?
For decades spreadsheets and costing software have been the best alternatives to determine costs. It is now more important than ever to transform these methods and leverage clinical and financial data in order to gain control of healthcare costs. Understanding costs requires healthcare organizations to leverage clinical and financial data to create transparent costing models that identify profitability across service lines, patients and encounters. Creating these transparent costing models is the key to driving healthcare costs down. Those few organizations that are able to transform data into decisions and harness the power of insightful and timely analytics are ahead of their competition.
Want to learn more about leveraging clinical and financial data to uncover costs and make better, more impactful decisions? Join us for a webinar on June 17th at 2:00 CT for a sneak peak demo of our new Perficient High Performance Costing Expressway and learn how it enables healthcare organizations to rapidly deploy a micro level costing solution to uncover their true costs. With the competitive nature of the healthcare industry we can help provide the road-map for your success.
