Healthcare leaders nationwide face common challenges, such as the need to standardize care delivery, reduce lengths of stay, and find effective ways to track the progress of initiatives aimed at enhancing care delivery and reducing costs. 

Having the help of industry experts who are well versed in such efforts can help organizations develop and execute effective strategies to overcome such challenges. Strata’s Continuous Improvement advisory services team members bring decades of experience in operational and financial performance improvement. They help identify opportunities and design cost reduction and process improvement programs based on proven best practices. 

With their expertise in Strata’s solutions, the Continuous Improvement advisory services team leverages the StrataJazz® Continuous Improvement solution to design a tailored margin management infrastructure to suit specific organizational needs. The team helps hospitals and health systems identify cost savings opportunities that are vetted and quantified at the financial level. Team members then help organizations establish a sustainable approach to manage and contain costs, based on strengths and gaps identified through extensive analysis.  

The following are three examples of how StrataJazz customers have partnered with advisory services to use Continuous Improvement to reduce costs and improve outcomes. 

Reducing lengths of stay to improve care, realize savings

Several factors contributed to high lengths of stay in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at a Midwest health system. There were issues with limited physician availability, variations in how care was delivered, challenges in care coordination and collaboration among specialists, coding inconsistencies, and challenges in managing family expectations. 

Strata helped the health system establish a multidisciplinary forum and workgroup to identify barriers that prevented patients from being discharged in a timely manner. They also identified the need to standardize care practices in two key areas: managing apnea events and addressing feeding problems that affected patients’ growth. Additional initiatives included optimizing staffing, improving collaboration and communication, and focusing efforts to enhance physician documentation. The health system’s finance team also partnered with Strata to track outcomes and provide transparency on the financial impacts of the various initiatives.  

Results: The health system succeeded in steadily decreasing lengths of stay and was able to exceed its original goals over four years. Within two years, the organization realized approximately $1 million in savings as a result of its efforts. 

Tracking care pathways to monitor adherence, gauge effectiveness 

A large health system in the Northeast recognized a growing need to standardize patient care to improve care delivery and enhance patient outcomes organization wide. Health system leaders designed a comprehensive program that utilizes a robust methodology to enhance the effectiveness and efficacy of care delivery across the organization’s more than 200 clinical pathways.  

In addition to standardizing care, however, the health system needed a way to monitor the implementation and progress of initiatives across its many care sites. There was a clear gap in understanding the impact of pathways like pulmonary embolism (PE), both clinically and financially. To bridge this gap, the team partnered with the Strata Continuous Improvement advisory services team to analyze pathway performance during pre- and post-intervention periods for PE. 

The analysis was stratified by clinicians who did and did not access the pathway. Some of the metrics compared between populations included length of stay, discharge status disposition, mortality rate, and utilization of specific drugs and therapies, such as vasopressors. 

Results: Analysis through StrataJazz Continuous Improvement revealed that pathway patients had higher case mix index (CMI) with longer lengths of stay in the intensive care unit (ICU), but they were more likely to receive advanced therapies and had a shorter overall hospital length of stay. This analysis provided the team with visibility to outcomes to support the program’s adoption and evolution, helping to further standardize and improve patient care across the health system. 

Consolidating initiative tracking to optimize and streamline opportunities

At a large academic health system in the Midwest, teams historically worked at a hospital level to identify potential savings opportunities and implement improvement programs. This created a siloed approach to both tracking and executing savings initiatives. The organization hired an outside consultant to track projects in Excel, but the effort was not centralized and, consequently, made transparency across the organization more difficult. 

To address these challenges, the health system then partnered with Strata’s advisory services team to leverage Continuous Improvement to assist in identifying and monitoring projects across the organization. The team used the solution’s automated savings algorithms to identify unnecessary care variations and waste. At the same time, the team used a combined tracking and workflow tool to drive accountability and action.  

Health system leaders accessed Strata’s global opportunities list of more than 90 cost savings opportunities from across the platform’s user base to review the viability of its own opportunities and prioritize them within the system. Using the global opportunities list, the organization identified $12.8 million in savings opportunities. Combined with its own, organization-specific cost savings initiatives, the health system identified a total of $16.4 million in potential savings.  

Results: Through validation efforts and prioritization, the team focused on projects targeting more than $1.2 million in savings. As the organization continues to partner with Strata and leverage Continuous Improvement, it can now centralize all cost improvement efforts to drive system-wide identification of opportunities and better, more consistent execution of cost savings.  

If you need additional expertise or resources to identify continuous improvement opportunities for your organization, you can engage Strata’s team to lead initiatives from launch through to effective integration of behavior changes. Visit our website for more information about StrataJazz Continuous Improvement, or contact Strata to learn more.