Healthcare costs are rising at a faster pace than the economy is growing. Hospitals are often the focus of this concern, because they constitute the largest single component of healthcare spending. When looking at hospital costs, it is important to keep in mind that there are both direct and indirect expenses that contribute 
to the total cost of care.
How do we understand total cost of care? Our team of experts leverages a proprietary technology for our clients called the Perficient High-Performance Costing Expressway, which enables transparency of fully burdened margin by service, patient and procedure. For decades, spreadsheets and costing software have been the best alternatives in determining cost of care. It is now more important than ever to transform these methods and leverage administrative, clinical and financial data in order to gain control of healthcare costs. Creating transparent costing models to indicate profitability across multiple dimensions of data is the key to driving healthcare costs down.
Embracing data-driven decision making in a provider setting requires agile thinking to pinpoint and respond to the short- and long-term needs of the organization. This shift requires finance departments to transcend from the typical focus on aggregating data to a value-added analytical view of hospital data. This new approach will provide greater visibility into changes in variables and assumptions and will require organizations to fully understand and ensure transparency exists for key performance indicators.
In evaluating supplies, labor, productivity or clinical effectiveness, the quality/cost/value equation requires an organization to truly understand its data. This includes not only considering the right product at the right place but also applying a broader perspective on clinical evidence for resources used and approaches employed. Data by itself doesn’t make a company successful; organizations must act on information and filter what is useful, appropriate, and above all else actionable. 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.
Perficient will be on hand to demonstrate the High-Performance Costing Expressway on display at OpenWorld 2014. Stop by and visit with our Healthcare experts at the Healthcare Solutions in Industry Central (Marriott Hotel 2nd floor).
Not attending #OOW14? Learn more about our costing solution here.
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