Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

What Healthcare Providers Can Expect

By Morgan Atkins
Vice President, Product and Innovation

Why It Helps to Get Good Intelligence Fast

By Morgan Atkins 

With some things, fast is just better. Fast food, fast cars, and strategic insights that are delivered fast so you can progress to the more important work of making decisions and implementing plans.  

The priority is for strategic intelligence to be good, sound, and reliable. But these requirements shouldn’t preclude you from a quick analysis and easy distribution.

With Stratasan's platform, you can access the latest intelligence and have it be easily shareable. As a result, your team will be more flexible and nimble when it comes to growth planning. 

There are major benefits to high-quality, streamlined strategic intelligence, which is something we keep top of mind in designing our platforms. We’ll discuss this idea further throughout this post.

More Efficiently, and Effectively, Manage this Valuable Resource

By Morgan Atkins 

A community Physician Needs Analysis (PNA) is a valuable asset for hospitals looking to meet the needs of their community through service line growth and physician and provider recruitment. But in order to successfully execute a PNA, you first need your physician database (or roster) to be accurate.

The details of a physician database—physician retirement dates, specialties, affiliation status, and so much more—provide a more complete understanding of what’s in your market. This database can help you answer questions such as: Where is there an oversupply (or undersupply) of physicians? What are the referral patterns of the physicians in my service area? Answers to these questions can directly impact your physician strategy.

Don't miss this related post: Top Methodologies for Determining Physician Need

Maintaining an up-to-date physician database can be a tedious, and often manual, process. The challenge? Collecting all the right information and ensuring that the data you have is current, since physicians are often moving or changing affiliations. In this post, we’ll share the sources we use, and strategies we employ, to make the process of maintaining an accurate physician database more feasible.

Key Details Related to This Ruling

By Morgan Atkins

On November 15, 2019, the final price transparency rule was issued by CMS. It went into effect on January 1, 2021. Here's what hospitals need to know about the goal of this ruling and what they have to do to achieve compliance. 

The Cliff Notes 

A couple of key points hospitals should keep in mind:

• All hospitals must participate, though it’s not applicable to federally owned hospitals (VA, IHS, Tribal)
• Prices must be updated annually

There are two essential parts to the ruling:

Part 1: Hospitals must share a comprehensive list of standard charges. The list must be in a single machine-readable file format. 

Part 2: Hospitals must share a consumer-friendly list of 300 shoppable services. 

• CMS lists 70 services that must be included in the 300; hospitals can select the other 230
• There’s no requirement for how to post this list, i.e., a machine-readable format is not required. And the listing requirement is waived for hospitals already providing internet-based price estimator tools for patients.

Drive Growth and Provide Quality Care

By Morgan Atkins

While vital to growth, service line development can be risky and typically requires a significant time and financial investment. In order to minimize risk and expand your service offerings more effectively, hospitals need reliable, data-based intelligence to guide their efforts.

In this post, we consider four ways to identify pockets of unmet demand and consider how to add new facilities in these areas. We’ll highlight some common mistakes providers often make and discuss how to get a more detailed understanding of your patient population so you can focus on the right service line growth opportunities.

Uncover the Fundamental Truths Your All-Payer Claims Data Should Deliver

By Morgan Atkins and Daniel Dreaden

Not all all-payer claims data (APCD) is created equally. Depending on the data aggregator and clearinghouse(s) used, the APCD offered by any given analytics company can vary significantly.

When choosing a partner to provide your APCD, it can be difficult to discern what’s most important. Many incentives offered may sound nice to have, but could also be distractions to keep you from noticing more critical features that are lacking. As you consider your options, keep these three questions in mind:

• Does this APCD provide patient cohort tracking?
• Will you be able to access submit and remit data?
• Is there transparency into what is being modeled and how?

Let's discuss in more detail each of these questions and why it’s critical to have these clearly answered before signing on with an APCD provider.

Tracking Care Patterns by Cancer Site

By Morgan Atkins and April Adams

Earlier this year, members of the Stratasan team conducted a study to determine if treatment care patterns differ for oncology patients by cancer site. The hypothesis was that the most common treatment path for cancer patients is to first seek surgical treatment, then medical, then radiological. Patients were grouped by their order of transition from surgical, medical, and radiological procedures. 

Below you will find the results of this study.

By Morgan Atkins

In the healthcare industry, marketing professionals and strategic growth planners are tasked with the important job of creating stories out of data—the art of visualization. You must take rows upon rows of data and transform it into an easily digestible format—a skill that when executed properly, is extremely valuable. Anyone can create a bar graph, but the ability to create visualizations that are meaningful and insightful is an art form. 

Strategic Planning and Site Placements

Picking the right location is a critical challenge for any hospital or health system looking to grow strategically through a new site placement. Coffee shops provide a simple, yet appropriate, illustration. You have likely seen a hip, new coffee shop that serves great drinks close their doors after six months because it was in the wrong geographic location and couldn’t generate enough business. Perhaps visitors didn’t bother going because it was too far “off the beaten path.” Or there was always a line of cars waiting to turn into the parking lot so everyone who visited ended up frustrated or late to their final destination because of the congestion (and thus, never returned). Either way, you hopefully see the point: whether it’s coffee or medical care, people tend to make purchase decisions based off of location and convenience.

Key Opportunities Hospitals Leaders Shouldn’t Overlook

By Morgan Atkins

The trials of 2020 have left many in the healthcare industry searching for ways to diversify their income. Due to COVID-19, hospitals across the nation are estimated to lose $200 billion between March 1 and June 30, according to a report from the American Hospital Association. This current financial strain and shaky future prospects are pushing healthcare institutions to find creative ways to keep revenue flowing while still maintaining high-quality care.

Becker’s Hospital Review cites the reimbursement landscape challenges and dwindling patient volumes as two main factors leading at least 29 hospitals across the U.S. to file for bankruptcy this year. In this post, we’ll consider how hospital leaders can turn these leading indicators of distress into golden opportunities for growth.