Healthcare leaders are challenged to understand the true costs associated with providing care. If you ask caregivers to determine their current workflow, they don’t really know where the patient and family go before or after each step of their care so the total care pathway is not in their purview. This is a well-known challenge for implementing clinical effectiveness improvements whether it comes to improving care or lowering cost. I’ve worked on multiple committees in the hospital environment designed to lower costs for current patients and/or provide transparency on expected charges to consumers (future patients). One tactic that we used to achieve transparency was to shadow the caregivers to gather information about the care process to define each step and duration of the care pathway. We were able to compare this data to retrospective analysis of patient populations to “test” our 
data.
It would have been even more powerful to feed this data into a Time-Driven Activity Based Costing (TDABC) Model to determine not only the forecasted charges but also the “true cost” of care by modeling how much is being spent on consumables, personnel and space/equipment during the care pathway. Coupling TDABC with a time based study to pinpoint the best places to reduce cost and measure to make sure that the change is actually an improvement, creates a collaborative environment for handling cost reductions and avoids the traditional approach of having to implement top-down, across the board budget cuts.
Join our team of industry experts for a webinar. “Leveraging Clinical and Financial Data to Identify Cost Savings, Improve Profitability and Improve Decision-Making” on June 17, 2014 from 2:00 to 3:00 CST. Using a case study discussing multiple scenarios for activity based costing for Pediatric Care Transitions, this webinar will explore how the Perficient High Performance Costing Expressway extracts clinical cost data, consolidates and allocates across the system to discover true patient costs.
The Perficient High Performance Costing Expressway delivers solutions that work for the people who need them at the right time and for the right cost. Perficient experts will be on hand in booth #1159 at HFMA National Institute 2014, #ANI2014. Join us there to view a demo of the Perficient High Performance Costing Expressway and hear our BIG IDEAS!
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View my recent blogs:
Elevating the Role of Finance within the Hospital
Enterprise Warehouses: The Gift that Keeps on Giving
Balancing clinical effectiveness with profitability
