Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Intermountain Health serves patients and communities as the largest nonprofit health system in the Intermountain West, including Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming. Intermountain provides care at 34 hospitals and 400 clinics, while also providing telehealth services for over 3 million patients.
With a reputation for innovation, Intermountain has continued to find new ways to support and invest in the communities it serves. As part of a decades-long partnership, Strata continues to support Intermountain in its mission of helping people live the healthiest lives possible®. The health system’s many initiatives include investing in collaborative programs that support seniors, veterans, and those experiencing homelessness, as well as continuing to expand the reach of its telehealth services.
As users of the full StrataJazz® platform, Intermountain leverages Strata’s continuous improvement, decision support, and financial planning tools. Today, we recognize Intermountain for their recent accomplishments, as well as the nearly 20-year journey they have been on with Strata, consistently setting new industry best practices along the way.
Intermountain set the standard for capital planning best practices when the organization adopted StrataJazz® Capital Planning in 2006. In partnership with Strata, Intermountain developed increased rigor around the capital planning process by involving leaders at each step. During look-backs, senior executives score projects based on how they align with future investments or operational success. Intermountain’s leaders developed forward-thinking evaluation criteria and benchmarking as part of this process. To enable agile decision-making, C-suite leaders are engaged and meet quarterly with the finance team to evaluate upcoming funds for budgeted projects, making changes if circumstances have changed. Leveraging the tool, Intermountain can make strategic, efficient decisions around capital investments, allowing them to fund proposals that meet community needs.
Later in 2019, to tackle the challenges of using an annual budget, Intermountain adopted StrataJazz® Financial Planning and the Dynamic Planning methodology. Before, the annual budget often was outdated and didn’t account for industry challenges, like the shift to value-based payment models and rising costs. Dynamic Planning allows Intermountain to forecast quarterly, identifying key performance trends or gaps more efficiently. The organization used StrataJazz® Financial Planning to understand costs and margins across episodes of care, service lines, and patient populations. Dynamic Planning also helped Intermountain take a more agile approach, engaging C-suite leaders in the identification of financial targets and in translating those targets from an enterprise level to individual units and departments. This approach allows the organization’s leaders more time to think strategically and focus on growth initiatives.
Finally, in the last year, Intermountain has leveraged StrataJazz® Continuous Improvement to identify opportunities for cost savings. The organization’s cost stewardship team now partners with clinical program leaders to track and report progress on nine identified clinical cost savings programs. Meeting monthly, these groups partner to identify additional cost savings opportunities, validate previously identified opportunities, and report on current initiative savings. Seeing the results, other groups quickly came forward asking to use the tool for their projects – which meant they would need to expand and onboard more users to drive cost savings in other areas. Since April, Intermountain has partnered with Strata to establish a Strata Continuous Improvement Governance Committee to develop best practices and guidelines for user roles and responsibilities. They also rolled out StrataJazz® Continuous Improvement to finance leaders, all finance caregivers, the supply chain team, and the quality team. In addition to in-depth training, the organization is working to provide support via monthly coordination committee meetings and monthly Strata Continuous Improvement Office Hours.
Headquartered in Rapid City, South Dakota, Monument Health is a community-based healthcare system with a mission to make a difference every day. This system offers care in 31 medical specialties and serves 12 communities across western South Dakota. With over 5,000 physicians and caregivers, Monument Health is composed of 5 hospitals and more than 40 medical clinics and specialty centers, and is a member of the Mayo Clinic Care Network.
Like many healthcare organizations, Monument Health continued to feel the impacts of labor shortages coupled with rising labor costs, and other related challenges. The system had a largely manual position requisition process that lacked clarity and transparency, and a disconnect between operations and clinical staff left a gap in financial decision-making. Leaders knew they needed a tool to better support their teams in decision-making.
With workforce optimization top of mind, Monument Health leveraged Axiom Performance Reporting and Productivity and Comparative Analytics to develop a new position control process. The organization used Axiom to create a completely electronic process that could be a source of truth for real-time, trusted data for financial and operational leaders. They now use automation to drive workflow and manage both straightforward and more complex requests.
Monument leaders also focused on their department position control to provide clarity and transparency across position tracking. Building a dashboard accessible across disciplines, Monument used the Axiom tool to integrate employee and recruiting data with budget data. Providing the same view of this more real-time data across roles enabled a smoother budgeting process and gave leaders more transparency into this data. By incorporating external benchmarks from Strata’s Comparative Analytics, Monument Health is even underpinning its position requisition process with data. Managers must document how well their productivity benchmarks against their peers when requesting new positions.
To support their clinical leaders, Monument Health leveraged Axiom to build a teaching tool that could break down information into an easy-to-understand visual of FTEs to workload. Because the tool then communicates with Monument’s scheduling system and HR team, the data can drive the budget, position control, and department-level decisions to promote productivity. For areas that don’t yet live in the tool, Monument Health created a stats page for leaders to quickly review information on a biweekly basis. The Monument team continues to evolve and provide its leaders with valuable, easy-to-use tools and visualizations to drive productivity.
