As healthcare workers continue to bravely stand at the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals are being pushed to the brink of financial collapse. Across the country, healthcare providers are dealing with significantly higher costs due to COVID-19 and are facing a major reduction in the number of patients accessing their hospitals for care. While patients are beginning to reschedule elective surgeries, continued delays in critical patient care could mean another wave of challenges for hospitals.

L7 allows healthcare organizations to assess their current state relative to available costing methodologies and provides a road map for their strategic needs. This eight-stage model assesses organizations by measuring the adoption and utilization of advanced cost accounting methods, including capabilities like Time-Driven Costing™. As an organization moves up the model, they acquire more sophisticated costing processes and workflows and more meaningful output.

At the end of this webinar, you will have a better understanding of what the L7 model is and why it was developed. You will also understand what is required of a cost model within each level and the value that each level provides.

In today’s fiscally-conscious healthcare environment, many health systems have at least some focus and structure on cost reduction. However, it is not uncommon for these efforts to feel rushed, unorganized, and even chaotic at times. Typically, significant savings opportunities are identified in only a matter of weeks with the expectation that the costs will be removed shortly thereafter. While this approach may work once or twice, it is not a sustainable methodology for ongoing cost reduction programs.

Between Strata’s Decision Support and Continuous Improvement solutions, we are essentially helping to manage hundreds of cost reduction programs across our client base. This provides unique insights into what works, what doesn’t, and common pitfalls organizations struggle with in their efforts towards real, hard dollar realized savings. Join us as we share “What Great Looks Like”. Naturally, it can be overwhelming trying to get to best practice status all at once. So, we’ll make it simple by outlining a step-by-step approach for cost improvement programs that work!

Objectives
• Define what “great” looks like regarding comprehensive cost improvement programs
• Walk through the step-by-step approach towards best practice and how to get there

In 2017, the OSF financial planning team saw an opportunity to shift their organization away from traditional financial planning. The landscape of their business was changing: their organization was adopting new leadership structures, was developing a thirst to embrace accountability in new ways, and transitioning to a new general ledger system. These undercurrents provided a springboard for finance to jump right in and make some impactful change: enter Dynamic Planning.

This session will explore the path that OSF has taken to move to dynamic planning and how they were able to reduce their budgeting timeline by 80%. We will also explore how to best leverage the Strata solutions to support this transition.

Continuous Improvement (CI) is a fantastic tool to help organizations find variation-based cost savings opportunities. This is typically the primary value proposition of the solution in that it is a beacon for cost reduction initiatives. But, what if you are an organization that while interested in new savings opportunities, your primary need is to effectively track all the projects currently in motion within the organization/system? CI has you covered here too! In addition to finding new savings opportunities, the solution also includes built-in workflow for centralized project management and in many cases, hands-off, automated monthly tracking.

Join us as we showcase The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Here you will see exactly what an established, successful cost reduction program looks like and how they decided to leverage the CI solution to best meet their needs.

Healthcare organizations are challenged to deliver high quality care amidst an evolving business landscape. While clinical care is at the core of their work, the organization’s ability to deliver that care with high quality and efficiency requires strong alignment between Operations and Finance.

The goals of healthcare systems across the country are rooted in the Healthcare Triple Aim1: improving the patient experience and the health of populations, while reducing the cost of care. However, within each organization, those goals are specific to the unique environment in which it operates. Whether they are focused on margin improvement, reducing variation in care delivery, investing in growth, or simply achieving financial targets, Finance teams are instrumental in enabling these objectives.

In this session, we will review the components necessary to ensure your financial processes are aligned with the organization’s goals:
• Cascading metrics: connecting the dots between enterprise-level objectives and the financial targets for operations and clinical teams
• Intuitive tools: Workflow and analytics to empower executive, finance, and operational end users
• Sustainable processes: Clearly defined roles & responsibilities, reviews and stakeholder engagement to drive accountability

Each organization (and often each entity, service line, or department within one organization) is at a different level of maturity across these components. We will discuss the plays you and your teams can run to start moving towards a robust performance management model that effectively aligns your financial processes with your organizational goals.

Learning Objectives:
1. Understand ways to assess the effectiveness of your organization’s current performance management environment
2. Learn about proven methods that other healthcare systems have implemented to drive alignment
3. Learn the plays you can run to improve the way your finance teams enable performance management to achieve organizational goals

Almost every hospital has a team of skilled, qualified and effective clinical quality professionals committed to reducing harm to improve overall quality for their patients. To ensure that care is always within industry and regulatory standards, these professionals own and closely monitor an important set of metrics. When metrics get outside of established limits—or certain harm events occur—these professionals step into action. Teams thoroughly review patient data, current processes, and anything that can help them to find root causes and put improvement plans into place. When they are successful at reducing harm and improving quality events, these teams are championed. The problem? This is only half of the story.

Improving quality is incredibly important, but it is only half of the story that should be told when it comes to successful initiatives meant to reduce harm. What about cost? Cost is often left out of the success narrative because there has been no good, reliable and valid way to calculate the associated costs to harm events – until now.

Join this webinar to hear experts from Strata Decision Technology share how we have helped over 31 healthcare organizations see cost savings—in real dollars—associated with reducing harm events.

Many health systems are feeling pinched by reductions in overall reimbursement rates, high deductible health plans, more aggressive payer tactics to reduce payments, and potential growth in uninsured populations. Moreover, ACOs are adding downside risks and payers are getting much more savvy with using data to target care they deem unnecessary. In short, the environment is difficult and payment from traditional payers and plans is trending down.

For years, organizations have been talking about how to better use their data to influence payers, increase reimbursement, and grow volume. They want to get rewarded for their high quality, their care coordination, and their investment to go into the community. This has proven challenging for a variety of reasons as organizations do not have trusted cost data to share with payers, find it difficult to put cost and quality together in a meaningful way, and are challenged with analyzing the cost of care and quality of care across the continuum of care.
This session will explore more advanced tools which available to combine clinical and cost data, to run algorithms to group episodes of care, ID variation, and ID quality incidents.

Objectives:
1. Learn how to identify gaps in your current state that are hinderances from either being profitable on alternative reimbursement models or from taking on more risk.
2. Explore new tools that providers can utilize to identify specific case types or care pathways that are known to be effective.
3. Discuss creating specific initiatives to improve cost, quality, or care coordination.

The type of Continuous Improvement client has been changing recently. While we still have clients using the solution to identify cost reduction opportunities as a way to achieve a larger savings target, many clients are not starting at ground zero. Now that the need to be fiscally conscious has settled into the healthcare industry over the last few years, a lot of clients are deep into their cost reduction programs by the time Continuous Improvement is implemented. This means automated initiative tracking and centralized project management is priority # 1, identification of new variation-based savings opportunities is priority #2.

Join us as we do a deep dive into Continuous Improvement’s Org Defined tracking capabilities for initiatives ongoing and active within our client base. This includes a demo of current solution functionality and highlighting coming developments to improve this functionality even more.

Objectives
• Understand the current solution functionality when it comes to Org Define initiative tracking
• See the planned development vision for enhanced Org Defined solution functionality
• Emphasize the importance of automated monthly tracking and centralized project management that the tool provides
• Incorporate automated monthly tracking beyond common, typically GL-based initiatives to also include Quality-aligned projects as well

The first draft of the Strata Center of Excellence, our open source “Playbook” of best practices to help your organization drive margin to fuel your mission. Join this session but we want you to be the first to preview our plays as you consider opportunities to improve how you plan, analyze and perform to bring additional value to your organization. We will be enhancing these plays and building out more in collaboration with you and our network of 200 healthcare delivery systems across the U.S.