TREND #4: FINANCIAL TRANSPARENCY: MODERNIZE YOUR DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEM
As the healthcare industry moves toward value-based payment models and population health management, the need to innovate is paramount when it comes to cost management. Today’s CFO needs a new generation of decision-support technology solutions along with unprecedented access to transactional data to address tough questions across the continuum of care bringing together clinical, operational, and care delivery partnerships.
Most decision-support (aka costing) systems deliver the combined functions of cost accounting, budgeting, planning, forecasting, and workforce analytics in siloed applications and business processes. The next-generation technology must be delivered as a single, integrated suite that includes:
- Advanced costing solutions to equip users with the ability to apply a variety of costing methodologies and multiple methods to allocate departmental cost pools to the charge master as an accurate proxy of activity and service consumption.
- Cost reports that provide traceability to achieve the required transparency to allocated data.
- Granular and historical data for analytics, modeling, and the integrations to achieve a closed-loop process for measuring KPIs. This includes both an interrogation of margin and an alignment back to the short-term and long-term budgets that guide the organization.
A report from the IDC emphasizes the importance of cost accounting has been growing over the years and is coming into focus following the introduction of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2010. PPACA offered a number of mechanisms and approaches as well as programs for achieving its aim, to improve the quality of care and outcomes for patients, while increasing access and decreasing the cost of care. Cost containment cannot be accomplished without an accurate and detailed understanding of cost, and the factors that influence it, to understand opportunities for cost containment, an essential component of success in Accountable Care. These market drivers create a need for better and more robust cost accounting systems in provider organizations.
This is just one of the healthcare enterprise performance management trends. In our new guide, we take a look at six performance management trends healthcare executives need to be thinking about in 2016 and beyond. We’ll identify technology strategies and solutions that will help healthcare organizations succeed in a data-driven, cost-management culture.
