6 Steps to Healthcare Performance Improvement Through Peer Comparisons

In an unpredictable healthcare landscape, understanding how your hospital compares to similar organizations is essential for building financial stability and driving improvement. This e-book outlines six practical steps for using comparative analytics to uncover opportunities, benchmark progress, and guide smarter decisions. 

 

By comparing your performance to local and regional peers, you can: 

Service Line Planning Roadmap: Best Practices Through a Year-Round Approach

As healthcare leaders navigate an ever-changing healthcare environment, they need a strategy that allows them to remain nimble in response to shifting market conditions. Service line planning allows organizations to continually analyze their operations to drive informed decision-making in real time. Yet many organizations face barriers, such as varied service line definitions, misaligned incentives, or unreliable data.  

Healthcare Performance Trends

The Strata Performance Trends report combines financial, operational, and claims data from hospitals, health systems, and other healthcare organizations across the country. The data show that financial performance continued to lag in Q3 2025 as organizations experienced widening disparities by system size, patient acuity, and service line mix. 

Key findings include:

CFO Outlook for Healthcare

Financial performance stabilized for many healthcare organizations throughout 2024, and healthcare leaders are cautiously optimistic they’ll retain those financial gains in 2025. ​Our annual survey of healthcare finance professionals found that more than two in five (44%) said they expect operating margins will remain about the same from 2024 to 2025, while over a third (36%) expect operating margins will increase. 

2024 Higher Education Summit

Join peers, Strata experts, and industry leaders for two days of insightful sessions, and hear how healthcare organizations across the country are tackling today’s biggest challenges. Leaders from peer organizations will share best practices that will help you propel your organization’s financial planning, analytics, and performance processes.  

Cape Fear Valley Health System Reports Major Agency Reductions and Broader Growth Planning Enabled by Strata

For more than two decades, Cape Fear Valley Health System has used a combination of Strata solutions to strengthen labor management discipline, identify cost-reduction opportunities, and support longer-range financial and growth planning. Today, the organization continues to fine-tune its processes. Using analytics and benchmarking to bolster financial planning and cost accounting has led to more informed, impactful decisions spanning areas like labor management and service line planning.

How SUNY Broome Moved from Spreadsheet Silos to Integrated, Insight-Driven Planning

Too often, budgeting in higher education relies on disconnected spreadsheets and manual processes that consume valuable time and limit strategic insight. SUNY Broome Community College faced this familiar challenge, with fragmented files, limited visibility, and a budgeting process that left little room for forward-looking planning.

Strata’s Predictive Analytics for Health Systems

Health systems operate in constant volatility: shifting volumes, reimbursement uncertainty, labor pressure, and tight margins. Yet most forecasting tools still rely on manual processes and static assumptions, requiring significant effort to incorporate the latest data, often leaving finance teams with an outdated view by the time forecasts are updated, too late to change the outcome.