Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

Address Blockages and Pinpoint Opportunities for Growth

By Jennifer Keller

Retaining and improving bottom line profits is a key priority for healthcare planners and strategists. Often when considering how to grow, patient outmigration and physician referral leakage are top of mind. Patient retention and well-maintained physician relationships are key to maintaining a strong financial standing, especially for rural hospitals.

“25% of rural hospitals nationwide are at a high risk of closing unless their financial situations improve. Of these hospitals, 82% are considered highly essential to their communities,” according to an annual Guidehouse analysis.

Many hospitals within close proximity to large U.S. cities are facing a serious financial challenge: patients who outmigrate to urban hospitals. This can happen due to patient preference or a physician referral, but it’s leading to lost revenue either way. 

It’s important to note though, this is not solely a rural hospital concern. A strong physician relations strategy is needed in many large urban areas to ensure you don’t lose patients to the large competitor right down the street.

How Stratasan Partnered with the Nashville Entrepreneur Center to Create Success

The Nashville Entrepreneur Center (EC) recently celebrated 11 years of operation with the launch of a new website. Alongside the website, they also released their first published annual report, which is a collection of 10 years of EC stories and achievements. Stratasan is honored to be featured on the website and in this annual report.

While the EC commemorates its notable accomplishment, Stratasan is also celebrating a big anniversary; May marks 10 years since our founding. For the past 10 years, our team of analysts, engineers, growth and product developers have been working to improve the healthcare space and change the way hospitals use data and analytics.

The close timing of our celebrations is no coincidence, as Stratasan’s story is closely tied to that of the EC. In this post, we’ll share how Stratasan and the EC are fortuitously linked and how Stratasan became the EC’s very first program participant in 2010.

Improve Your Negotiation Strategy and Establish Favorable Market Rates

By Jennifer Keller

When talking to clients in the midst of scaling operations in a new market, the question of how to establish attractive market rates often comes up. Entering a new market with rates too high can be a deterrent for growth and setting the right rates can be challenging.

The right data, insights, and tools are key to identifying the sweet spot when setting rates and planning for payer negotiations.  

Often, payer negotiations are driven by a team’s working knowledge of the market rates, or based on insufficient input from outside consultants. In this post, we’ll discuss how to use reimbursement data effectively when entering new markets and preparing for negotiations. 

We’ll discuss what data is needed, what new insights can be found, and how the right data can help your organization grow more successfully.

2020 has been a year full of learning, growing, and overcoming for all of us. We hope Stratasan's Strategic Growth blog series has been a bright spot in your week, delivering insight and inspiring creativity. We uncovered innovative solutions to the healthcare revenue crisis, learned how to identify service line opportunities, discovered how new diagnosis and procedure codes are created, and much more.

As we close out the year, we thought it'd be helpful to share our five most popular blog posts of 2020. These posts received the most views and seemed to provide useful growth guidance to you, our readers. If you’re staying home for the holidays or enjoying some downtime before the new year begins, check out these posts that you may have missed or revisit your favorites for fresh insight.

When entering payer/provider reimbursement negotiations, the need for data to back your position is critical. The right insights can show how your payer contracts compare to the market, how payer rates have changed over time from facility to facility, and highlight financial opportunity. This intelligence can equip you to more successfully navigate payer negotiations and leave with more favorable reimbursement rates.

The infographic below highlights a particularly helpful data-based insight called Fair Market Reimbursement. This is a reasonable range of reimbursement rates that all providers within a local market receive from a commercial insurer or payer. Created by our partner Ancore Health, the infographic below explains Fair Market Reimbursement in more detail, by answering several common questions.  

Level the Playing Field for More Productive Negotiations

By Jennifer Keller

There’s a discussion across healthcare about the need for greater price transparency. The talk is about whether or not patients should know the hard costs of medical procedures and how much they can expect to pay out of pocket for medical services. Armed with this information, they can shop around for care that fits their quality standards as well as their budget. 

At Stratasan, we feel there’s another layer of healthcare price transparency that’s needed—transparency that can level the playing field in provider-payer reimbursement negotiations. Both providers and payers are in need of more data to inform their negotiating position.

We hope it’s been an incredible year of learning through Stratasan's Strategic Growth blog series. We said goodbye to a dear friend, learned the secrets of the DIKW pyramid, uncovered innovative solutions to the healthcare revenue crisis, and much more.

As we close out the year, we thought it would be helpful to share the five most popular blog posts from 2019. These posts received the most views and seemed to provide useful growth guidance to you, our readers. If you’re traveling over the holidays or just enjoying some downtime before the new year begins, check out these posts that you may have missed or revisit your favorites for fresh insight.

Become Your Own Best Advocate with Trackable, Data-Based Reporting

By Jennifer Keller

As with any area in business, marketers and strategic planners must be able to prove the value of their work to leadership. Yet with their reputation as a cost center, these teams feel more pressure to demonstrate positive financial impact. Essentially, marketers and planners must be adept at marketing their own achievements if they want to gain approval for new initiatives and see their budgets grow year over year. This is particularly true in healthcare, where budgets are tightening and facing closer scrutiny.

In this post, we’ll discuss tools and strategies that healthcare marketers and planners can employ to show they are valuable contributors to growth. We’ll also cover some real-world examples of teams facing common challenges finding success, proving their worth, and driving growth. Let’s dig into two key ways to make your team indispensable.

How to Foster a Data-Focused Culture

By Jennifer Keller

Gist Healthcare provides a weekly newsletter called the Weekly Gist.  A popular read in our office, we find it to be informative and useful for staying on top of the latest healthcare news.  In this newsletter, they distill the latest healthcare news, trends, and conversations with industry leaders into actionable guidance for CEOs and senior executives.

A recent excerpt from Gist caught our attention. The CMO of a regional health system shared that: “his personal efforts to champion greater performance transparency and tracking of key clinical metrics made a big difference in [his] system’s impressive results in elevating physician performance.” He went on to emphasize that “getting the doctors addicted to data” was a critical element of his system’s success.

We hope it’s been an incredible year of growth and learning through Stratasan's Strategic Growth blog series. We’ve learned how to apply the principles of “good strategy” to our annual planning, outlined how to achieve organizational alignment, and discussed how to thrive as an independent hospital in challenging healthcare times.

As we close out the year, we thought it would be helpful to share the 5 most popular blog posts from 2018. These posts received the most hits and seemed to provide the most helpful growth guidance to you, our readers. If you’re traveling over the holidays or just enjoying some downtime before the new year begins, this is a great way to review helpful blog posts that you may have missed or revisit your favorites for fresh insight.