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Health Care Decision Making: Mobile Access to Financial Data is Helping Hospitals Respond

August 14, 2020

Hospitals are facing their toughest environment yet, and many are shifting their financial planning and cost accounting strategies as a result.

With 75% of health systems seeing negative margins within the first 30 days of the pandemic, COVID-19 has driven healthcare providers across the country to the brink of financial collapse.

In response, hospitals are now seeking more efficient processes and ways to reduce costs, apply for support, and help drive their hospitals back from massive losses.

Many are reassessing their cost model or starting up cost reduction projects or recovery programs in search of ways to drive margin.

Improving Hospital Cost Reduction and Decision Support with Access to Key Metrics

One way that hospitals are helping their staff to drive these initiatives is by providing their teams with access to important information that can help inform decisions made on the go. For hospital teams and leaders, it can be critical for them to access financial data that can empower them with faster decision-making and the actions necessary to achieve their targets.

Executive leadership in hospitals have expressed the need for flexibility in viewing data from their StrataJazz® dashboards while in meetings where it is uncommon for them to bring their laptops, during passing conversations with staff in the halls, or even after hours, when they may want to check important data points without diving into a full analysis.

Executive leadership need access to key data points to make decisions on the go.

As we continue to partner with our network of over 1,000 hospitals and more than 220 healthcare delivery systems, our team realized the need to provide this kind of on-the-go access to data from StrataJazz dashboards. This is especially true today, when healthcare providers across the U.S. need to be able to make swift, impactful decisions to drive margin in their recovery.

Driving Healthcare Planning with On-the-Go Access to Financial Data

StrataJazz Mobile provides users with dashboards that include key financial data, visualizations, and analytics from the StrataJazz platform. For our existing Strata customers, StrataJazz Mobile does not require additional product licensing, cost, or implementation effort.

Using StrataJazz Mobile, participating organizations will gain access to:

  • Mobile access to enabled StrataJazz Executive Dashboards on both Apple and Android platforms
  • A sleek and modern mobile interface, including access to metric tiles, charts, and graphs
  • Simple security setup to manage mobile access for users and dashboards

StrataJazz Mobile is a delivery mechanism for data and information, providing executives and finance leaders with access to curated dashboards and metrics such as volume, contribution margin, expense, and revenue.

To learn more about StrataJazz Mobile, reach out to your Experience Manager or, for organizations new to Strata, schedule a demo today.

By using StrataJazz Mobile, finance leaders can track year-to-date and month-to-date performance metrics relative to the system as a whole. Finance leaders can more easily identify their operating margin, how they are trending on accounts receivable, whether they are on track to meet their EBIDA target, and the variance between actual NPRS and their target.

StrataJazz Mobile helps department managers track year-to-date or month-to-date performance metrics relative to a specific entity or department. With access to this data, they can make informed decisions to trend against important targets like IP cases, year-to-date revenue or expenses, and month-to-date expenses.

Even clinical and operational leaders who are involved with patient care, managing teams, or driving business performance can use StrataJazz Mobile to stay informed on KPIs and metrics.

Accessing Financial Data for Healthcare COVID-19 Recovery

During COVID-19 recovery, healthcare providers can even access the Starter Set dashboard templates they used to visualize their volume, net revenue, and net income trends.

These COVID-19 reporting dashboards include:

  • COVID-19 Volume Trends Dashboard
  • COVID-19 Net Revenue Trends Dashboard
  • COVID-19 Net Income Trends

These dashboards allow financial leaders to access data trends surrounding changes to their volume, net revenue, and net income.

Using these and other Starter Set dashboards, leaders can quickly access data and drive collaboration with entity-level operational leadership. The Starter Set global repository of report and dashboard templates has helped customers across our network populate and visualize data.

Four key Starter Set dashboards built for use with StrataJazz Mobile include:

  1. Daily Charges: Finance and service-line leaders can use this dashboard to monitor day-to-day performance within top service lines, understand short-term variation, and inform action plans based on at-a-glance charges data at the system level.
  2. Daily Service Line Charges: Service-line leaders can use this dashboard to monitor day-to-day performance for a single service line, understand short-term variation, and inform action plans based on at-a-glance charges data at the service-line level.
  3. ED Daily Dashboard: This dashboard allows service-line leaders to monitor short-term volume trends in ED and react to changes in ED charges and patient mix.
  4. Patient Volume Statistics and CMI: Executive leaders can leverage the at-a-glance, system-level patient volumes in this dashboard to monitor patient census and short-term trends in CMI and to adjust planning to react to short-term spikes and dips.

Using these Starter Set dashboards designed for use with StrataJazz Mobile, organizations can use data on-the-go to inform their decisions and spur growth. Accessing data in this way during their COVID-19 recovery has enabled healthcare leaders to analyze key performance trends, identify areas for improvement, and engage their service-line leaders to take action.

Using Mobile Visualization Best Practices to Inform Healthcare Planning

We designed StrataJazz Mobile to help finance leaders, managers, and clinical operations staff gain quick, on-the-go access to the financial information they need to make informed decisions.

As a result, we’ve built the Mobile app using key visualization best practices:

  • 5 Second Rule: Dashboards should be able to answer the most frequently asked questions within 5 seconds.
  • Logical Layout: Dashboards should be organized with the most significant insights at the top, trends in the middle, and details towards the bottom.
  • Avoid Noise: Dashboards should include no more than 5-9 visualizations. Too many widgets can create “visual noise.”
  • Effective Visuals: Dashboard should utilize the appropriate visualizations to help tell the story in a concise way.

Across our customer base, organizations are seeing the value in providing clinical operations and finance teams with access to intuitive visualizations and key performance data.

To find out more about how your organization can use StrataJazz Mobile at your organization, Strata customers can contact their Experience Manager. Healthcare providers new to Strata can schedule a demo below to learn more.