Large Medical Group within $2B Integrated Health System in the Northeast, with over 700 physicians, partnered with Health Care Program Advisors to develop analytics solutions to contextualize data and drive operational decision-making and financial improvement.
About This Project
CASE STUDY
CHALLENGES
Manual process for tracking key operational metrics
Data from multiple IT systems
Data without context
Reactive decision making
Inconsistent data definition
SOLUTIONS
Cloud-based infrastructure
Centralized data repository
Data normalization
Automated KPI dashboards
Revenue cycle operations advisory
Single source of truth for leadership
RESULTS
Increased speed to insight
Proactive decision-making
Transparency across the organization
Improved financial performance
#1 most viewed dashboard across the organization
“The physician revenue cycle dashboard was a collaborative effort between HCPA, revenue cycle, and operations that created transparency and insight for all divisions. The final product was a seamless solution that resulted in a one-stop data shopping experience for our leadership.”
``We finally feel that we have all the tools and transparency at all leadership levels to allow us to be proactive in managing the factors that impact our financial and key metric performance. This fiscal year is the first time in my three-year tenure that our bottom-line financial performance is better than budget.``
The Challenge
Capturing clean, complete, accurate, and properly formatted data for operational use from multiple IT systems is an ongoing problem for healthcare organizations, many of which are struggling given competing priorities and the complexity of data management in healthcare. Organizations are often adept at looking back on historical performance but run into challenges using data for proactive decision-making. Like most that generate and maintain a large volume of clinical and financial data, the Medical Group had challenges translating that data into timely, actionable insights. Reliance on manual reports generated from disparate data silos left leaders with an incomplete picture of overall performance and the factors impacting performance. In response, the Medical Group, led by their Chief Operating Officer, launched a strategic initiative to develop a comprehensive and proactive approach to analytics.
The Solutions
The initiative had several components, including a critical examination and optimization of the reporting infrastructure and tools. The overarching goal was to capture the most critical metrics impacting financial performance and physician practice management and use those as catalysts for proactive decision-making across the organization. Specifically, the Medical Group wanted to understand the impacts driving financial and revenue cycle variances and how physician productivity and utilization impacted their business.
Needing a partner well versed in information technology, data analytics, and the nuances of healthcare financial operations, they engaged Health Care Program Advisors (HCPA) to lead the development. HCPA solved data integrity and visibility challenges by combining its systems and healthcare operations expertise with best-in-class data modeling tools, cloud infrastructure, and data visualization software. HCPA developed several automated analytics solutions for the Medical Group’s operational leadership team across revenue cycle and physician practice management. The dashboard solutions created through this initiative included:
- Net Revenue per wRVU dashboard that highlights revenue impacts related to payer mix, service mix, RVU volume, and revenue cycle operations,
- Physician Practice dashboard that enables physicians to review wRVU productivity and other key practice metrics in real-time, and
- Physician Revenue Cycle dashboard that provides a holistic view of revenue cycle performance.
The Impact
The Medical Group utilized the new solutions, coupled with its Financial Operational Review Meetings (FORMs), to create operational efficiencies and drive improvement. The actionable, insights-driven, and user-friendly reporting tools coupled with dedicated leadership reviews led to significant improvements, including:
- Improved financial performance compared to prior years
- Increased net patient revenue and gross collection rate coupled with a reduction in AR days and denials
- Real-time insights into revenue cycle gaps and opportunities
- Reduction in time spent building manual reports
- Root cause analysis of factors impacting revenue and expenses
- Proactive monitoring of key performance indicators
- A scalable infrastructure capable of supporting the data requirements of a large organization
HCPA helped them achieve other impressive milestones, including increased staff productivity and seamless access to dashboards enabling leaders to clearly define, track, and execute on strategic and operational objectives. The HCPA-built solutions were the organization’s top three most viewed analytics dashboards.
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