Converting Data to Action: How to Drive Financial Results with Accurate Data
May 15, 2019
On May 21, 2019, leaders from Strata Decision Technology presented at the 2019 Region 1 Annual Conference, attended by over 2,200 healthcare professionals from across the four New England Chapters. Below, you’ll find a recap and insights from the presentation, which can be applied to healthcare organizations at any level and in any region of the U.S.
Across the country, leaders in healthcare organizations face the same question: how can we leverage our cost accounting data to improve financial performance?
Even with accurate cost data, providers still struggle to get that data to the right people at the right time. Both entity and service line teams find themselves handcuffed by lack of access and lack of context, even when they know their organization has meaningful cost data. Without insight into trending performance, it can become difficult to be able to hold staff accountable for meeting expectations and delivering improvements on KPIs. With an inconsistent performance review structure and process, it can be difficult to coordinate the necessary efforts across teams to improve the organization’s bottom line.
For organizations like yours to convert “data to action,” it is critical to provide users with both education to understand the data and the right tools to make informed decisions. To grow margin and empower users, consider the following strategies for driving financial results with accurate, accessible, and actionable data.
- Comprehensive & Accurate Data
Before you can deliver insightful analytics to the right people within your organization, you need the right data. While hundreds of organizations have already started moving through their journey to advanced cost accounting, your organization can benefit from their learnings and best practices. Take advantage of resources like the HFMA-Strata L7 Cost Accounting Adoption Model to determine where other organizations are in utilizing their comprehensive and accurate cost data and where you could go.
- Accessibility & Governance
Dedicate the right resources to their need: pair team members with appropriate skills and dedicated capacity with the right projects involving data, costing, and analytics. Start by defining your organization’s costing and analytics governance model, to efficiently provide access to costing data and insights for cross-functional leaders that are standardized across the organization. Educate non-Finance teams on costing methodology and the nuances of your organization’s cost model to ensure accurate interpretation and understanding of the data. Lastly, establish standard, consistent definitions for metrics and a process for validating the accuracy of your data, to reinforce the integrity of the analytics shared with your end users.
- Performance Accountability
To drive accountability among operational and service line teams, partner with these teams to identify and deliver the information they need to understand and improve the cost-based performance of their respective teams. Design contextual dashboards and reports that provide cascading metrics and KPIs across levels of leadership, encouraging users to take action using costing insight within their scope of work. Implementing a standard financial performance process and cadence, with defined roles and responsibilities, will establish a common language across your organization to enable margin management and accountability.
- Scaled Performance Improvement
To help scale these improvements, leverage your wealth of cost accounting data to manage improvement opportunities using trend analysis, algorithms, and data visualization. Define your governance structure and initiative tracking process, so that you can review the savings opportunities and project results regularly with leadership.
While it can feel overwhelming to transform raw data into insights and action, using the tenants of “data to action” can help your organization plan out a consistent, standard process for getting data to the end users who need it.