Posts Tagged ‘Budgeting and Planning’

I’ve talked a lot lately about cost vs. quality but this time, I want to talk about why all this is important by telling a little story. A few years ago, I was visiting a CFO for a large academic medical center and he was interrupted for a discussion about a chronically ill international patient […]

Data from a recent study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute shows that individuals enrolled in high-deductible health plans are more likely to behave like consumers and seek data on price and quality before receiving care.1 This, combined with the effects of the Affordable Care Act, where trends are reflecting that more than 80% of […]

Robert S. Kaplan, PhD, writes about improving the “value of care” in this month’s HFMA magazine. “Existing cost measurement systems in healthcare are inadequate. They typically use inaccurate and arbitrary cost allocations and provide little transparency to guide clinician and staff driven efforts to reduce costs and improve processes to enhance outcomes. They also fail […]

Assembling the data needed to achieve financial transparency is both a technical and political challenge. My recent BLOG In Managing Finance at Hospitals, the Proof is in the Data discusses this in detail. I thought I’d take a moment now to discuss some of the software that combines clinical and financial data for cost management […]

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 […]

Terie McClintock, Director at Perficient, wrote an interesting blog post about the importance of merging clinical and financial data. Assembling this data requires a robust technical architecture that easily stores the data relationships with contextual integrity along with the ability to resolve patient or person identity. Once the data is assembled, leaders of the organization […]

Assembling data is both a technical and political challenge. I’ve been involved with multiple hospitals where the finance and clinical teams never really collaborate and therefore the lenses put on either domain is not terribly realistic. Truly merging and using the data requires clinical and financial leaders to establish trust and shared goals that promote […]

A former boss of mine, who happened to be the CFO of a large academic medical center, used to say the phrase “no margin, no mission” all the time. I’m not sure I really took the time to understand it at that point in time, but I have since then, “grown up”. My understanding of […]

Healthcare systems must be able to provide timely and accurate financial information for decision making and planning. Many hospitals and health systems are targeting hefty reductions in their operating budgets to maintain financially viable without interrupting investments in facility, information technology and other areas needed to remain competitive. This cost management culture requires organizations to […]

In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare environment, provider organizations must be able to identify financial performance gaps continuously and quickly change course when needed. As we discussed in my blog: Elevating the Role of Finance within the Hospital, this requires a partnership with operations to ensure that the correct metrics are correlated within the budget process, […]

Performance monitoring within the hospital can be accomplished through strategic partnerships between finance and operations. These partnerships serve the organization well and lead to financial steadiness. Let’s examine how this might work. A recent case study within the November issue of HFMA Magazine explores how Mary Lanning Healthcare in Nebraska showcased how data-driven decision making […]