Academic Health System Discovers $1.2 Million in First Five Months of Validating Cost Savings Opportunities

December 21, 2021

problem

Complex Health Systems Struggle to Identify, Validate and Sustain Cost Savings

As hospitals continue their efforts to reduce the cost of care while driving quality and improving the patient experience, organizations need guidance and structure to identify, validate and sustain savings. At one academic medical center in the Midwest, teams identified potential savings opportunities at the regional level, often creating a siloed approach to tracking and executing savings. They hired an outside consultant to track these projects in Excel, an approach that was not centralized and thus made following global opportunity leads more difficult. They needed to go from a manual, disjointed process for tracking these opportunities to one more streamlined to drive realization of savings.

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Academic Medical Center Automates Continuous Quality Improvement in Healthcare 

This organization partnered with Strata’s Continuous Improvement team and leveraged the StrataJazz^® Continuous Improvement tool to assist with project identification across the whole of the health system. By using the tool, the organization has moved away from their disjointed, manual process. They can now leverage automated savings algorithms to identify unnecessary variation and waste across their system, while using a combined tracking and workflow tool that drives accountability and action.  

The organization now uses StrataJazz Continuous Improvement to identify more impactful, high-level opportunities across the whole system. Whereas previously each regional team raised cost savings opportunities separately, global opportunities are now available to any team member across all regions of the health system. 

impact

Organization Pursues $1.2 Million in Cost Savings of $16.4 Million in Identified Potential 

Using Strata’s global opportunities list of over 90 global cost savings opportunities from across the user base of more than 50 customers, the organization began reviewing opportunities for viability and priority within their system. The use of the global opportunities list led to $12.8 million in identified opportunities, which combined with their own organization-specific identified cost savings, produced a total of $16.4 million in potential savings they are currently in the process of validating. Teams verify opportunities directly to ensure that reducing cost does not negatively impact quality or patient experience.  

Five months since the beginning of their engagement with Strata’s CI team, this organization has validated and is now in pursuit of over $1.2 million in savings out of the $16.4 million that was identified. As the organization continues to partner with Strata and leverage the Continuous Improvement tool, they can now centralize all cost improvements to drive system-wide identification and better, more consistent execution of cost savings. These projects continue to drive cost savings and fill gaps in the budget to help this organization execute more successful, ongoing global opportunities.