What Kind of Data is Needed to Track Healthcare KPIs?

Timely

The value of data deteriorates over time. Timely access to accurate, trustworthy, and robust data is essential. Using data that is 6-12 months old simply won’t cut it in today’s rapidly changing market. Any lag time makes it difficult to provide context to the numbers. 

Trustworthy

Data cleanliness or accuracy is a challenge for organizations across all industries, and healthcare is no exception. Rather than waiting for your data to be perfect, identify trustworthy data and use it to guide improvement. Capture data monthly from both internal and external sources, ideally within an integrated enterprise performance management platform that makes reporting easy. 

Comparative

Access to peer benchmark data provides context to measure performance against the market. It should include financial, patient, and clinical data and financial, labor, and clinical benchmarks drawn from at least 1,000 hospitals that represent the country’s hospitals by geography, bed size, and type. The breadth and depth of data enable finance leaders to identify relevant peer groups for comparative analysis across multiple performance dimensions.

What Healthcare KPIs Should Hospitals Track?

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of healthcare KPIs that hospitals can track, but less is more when it comes to measuring operational and financial performance. Consider monitoring the following top 10 hospital finance KPIs, several of which should be tracked at various levels — organization, hospital, department, provider, etc.:

1. Operating Margin: Measure profit after accounting for costs
2. Volume: Track the output and utilization at all levels of the organization 
3. Revenue: Ensure incoming cash is sufficient to cover expenses and monitor changes in various revenue-producing areas
4. Total Expense: Monitor total cost at various levels of the organization 
5. Labor Expense: Determine the percentage that labor contributes to total expense and monitor the composition of the labor expense
6. Length of Stay: Evaluate the amount of time your patients spend in the hospital 
7. Costs by Payer: Understand the types of health insurance your patients have and how that impacts your bottom line
8. Physician Investment: Track how much your health system spends to subsidize physician practices 
9. Compensation: Evaluate whether you are over- or under-paying the position types within your organization, including Physicians 
10. Productivity: Understand the output of each department, practice, and facility in relation to labor time and cost to produce that volume of output

How to Use Healthcare KPIs and Peer Benchmarks

For many healthcare organizations, comparing internal KPIs to peer performance remains an untapped opportunity. Comparative analysis helps healthcare organizations gain a more comprehensive and detailed view of whether they’re performing better, worse, or about the same as similar organizations. With data that proves performance improvement opportunities exist and peers are executing on those opportunities, healthcare leaders are motivated to pursue targeted corrective actions. 

Consider these six steps as a roadmap for ensuring you get the maximum value through the effective use of comparative analytics.

1. Determine which KPIs support your organization’s strategic priorities and initiatives. 
2. Determine how and where to locate required inputs. 
3. Create or adopt a common taxonomy that enables comparison to peer organizations. 
4. Agree to common key volume definitions and measurements. 
5. Incorporate modern technology solutions to support a rigorous approach to comparative analytics.
6. Nurture a management culture that embraces comparative analytics and prioritizes and supports initiatives based on achievement of targets.

Improve Performance with Accurate, Timely Hospital KPIs 

Syntellis offers vital insights, KPIs, and peer benchmarks needed to support sound decision-making on critical hospital investment, expense, and other business strategies. Axiom™ Comparative Analytics sources data from more than 1,000 hospitals monthly and includes more than 6,000 measures spanning 139 aggregated specialty categories. For healthcare leaders seeking more in-depth analyses, the data can be customized into specific peer groups — such as by specialty, practice size, or region.

Broaden value with unique operational and financial insights

Syntellis Market Insights provides key performance indicators across the most extensive range of service lines available in benchmarking solutions today. Metrics go beyond acute care to include outpatient, physician practices, imaging centers, home health and hospice, skilled nursing facilities, urgent care centers, and more.

Analytics and benchmarking data include key financial, operational, clinical, payroll, patient, and labor utilization measures from a strong cross-section of various types of hospitals, departments, practices, and specialties for comparison.

Four data subscription options: 

• Financial/Operational – Enhance budgets and financial forecasts and guide strategic operational improvements. Monthly data include margins, volumes, revenues, expenses, labor, productivity, and span of control across more than 40 types of acute and non-acute entities. 

• Clinical – Provide near real-time market views with monthly cost, quality, safety, and utilization data for systemwide evaluation and reporting down to the encounter level. Data represent over 2.3 million patient encounters harvested directly from healthcare decision support systems and stratified by MS-DRG. 

• Physician – Improve profitability and productivity with robust comparison data from 135,000 physicians across 10,000+ practice departments. Data include physician investments, compensation, revenue, productivity, and support staff benchmarks by specialty and region.  

• Capital Spend – Leverage capital purchase benchmarks from healthcare organizations nationwide to help clients remain competitive, justify capital purchases, and guide equipment selections. Data span capital spend, capital analysis, operations impact, vendors, and project status drawn monthly from 600+ hospital information systems.  

Identify improvement opportunities with near real-time precision

Data refreshes regularly to show metrics from the prior month, so you can quickly identify and guide your clients’ response to healthcare industry trends. The monthly updates give immediate visibility into action plan impacts, creating more time to course correct if needed.

Evaluate clients’ performance against industry benchmarks

Syntellis Market Insights provides the market knowledge needed to help you quickly spot clients’ greatest operational, financial, and clinical performance improvement opportunities so you can focus corrective strategies on the areas most likely to show the greatest impact. Set goals for incremental improvement using better-performing peers as the target. With 20 peer percentile targets per measure, you can develop achievable improvement action plans.

Work faster and smarter with flexible data delivery options

Choose from a user-friendly online portal, monthly file imports into your firm’s business intelligence tool, or process your clients’ raw data through Syntellis IQ into Axiom™ Comparative Analytics for the most robust, automated analysis — saving you time that’s better spent advising clients.

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Leveraging data collected directly from financial systems, Syntellis Market Insights provides the industry’s most timely access to operational and financial analytics thanks to Syntellis IQ, an expansive data science innovation solution that illuminates insights and accelerates performance improvement.