Large Single-Site Hospital Engages C-Suite and Operational Leaders in Service-Line Reporting

November 15, 2022

problem

Organizations Lack Processes for Reviewing and Validating Reports

Before partnering with Strata, this large single-site hospital had limited processes in place to review, validate and report on service-line level information. Service-line leaders had little insight into data, which left operations in the dark regarding profitability, margin and physician level costing. The team was heavily focused on quality metrics and did not hold service lines accountable to financial metrics.

To help deploy analytics and governance for service-line data, the organization partnered with Strata’s Advisory Services team following their implementation of StrataJazz^® Decision Support.

play

Engage Leaders to Deploy Analytics & Governance

After implementing StrataJazz Decision Support, this hospital partnered with Strata’s Advisory Services team to establish service-line data governance and analytics. With sponsorship from the CFO and VP of Finance, they identified three service-lines to pilot: Neuroscience, Orthopedics and Infectious Disease.

The Strata Advisory Services team performed an assessment where individuals including C-suite executives, Finance and Decision Support leaders, Service Line administrators and Operational managers were interviewed to understand the current and future use of Decision Support and costing data.

Throughout the pilot, the organization’s project work group met weekly to review and validate source data, designing two pilot dashboards (service-line and executive level service-line) with specific costing metrics and drillable profitability reports. The VP of Finance, VP of Service Lines, Sr. Director of Decision Support and Director of Business Intelligence all engaged in the design discussions to establish specific metrics for these pilot dashboards. The team then discussed and developed their governance structure. To ensure buy-in, they determined attendees, purpose and outputs for upcoming meetings. They established a monthly cadence to review service-line specific metrics and a quarterly cadence to review executive rollup metrics.

impact

Boost Accountability with Buy-In for New Governance & Analytics

With engagement and excitement from the C-suite, the rollout of new service-line analytics and governance led to a new-found sense of accountability for service-line leaders and physicians. Today, system leadership knows they are expected to view trends in decision support and patient-level cost data on a quarterly basis, as well as speak to variances and business plans for future optimization. This is something leaders could not do in the past. Today, operational leaders can use dashboards in StrataJazz to share financial updates, advance their service-lines and support the overall strategic goals and vision of their organization. With the help of the tool, the organization can now make service-line decisions around growth, physician recruitment, costing and profitability.

As they expand the pilot to other service-lines with a goal for full implementation across all service-lines by the end of the fiscal year, this organization is also continuing to provide training to help other service-lines replicate and customize dashboards with their own actionable metrics. By providing patient-level costing analytics and governance to all service-lines, they aim to enable data-driven decisions across their organization.