Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

Stratasan’s Summer Class of 2018

By April Adams, Caleb Blakenship, and Morris Eguakun

As referenced in this May 2018 post, we set a goal this year of taking Stratasan’s internship program a step further by targeting local colleges and students with an eye towards diversity and inclusion. We think it’s important to build a pathway for people from different backgrounds and experiences to look at Stratasan as an employer of choice—a goal that was certainly met with this group, as all three have accepted positions to continue working with our team!

While we still only want the best and brightest—we also want to be open to candidates who may have a unique background, have possibly served our country before entering college, or who have worked or traveled for a time before pursuing higher education. Our program is designed to:

1. Introduce diverse and underrepresented groups of undergraduate and graduate students to career options within our industry  
2. Provide a training ground for top talent to learn more about the analytical and technical side of our industry and our company
3. Position Stratasan as a future employer of choice

Online Marketing Strategies that Connect with Today’s Patient Needs

By Carly Farlow and Jennifer Keller

Today’s healthcare patients are searching the internet to understand medical symptoms, research diagnoses, and find trustworthy health information. They are also looking for providers and hospitals who can meet and address their unique needs and concerns. Rather than simply using the doctor down the street, today’s patient wants customized care over convenience, even if that means a longer commute to their provider of choice.

Healthcare marketing must continually evolve alongside patient needs, attracting patients by providing an online experience that is fresh, relevant, and reliable. A digital marketing strategy can be the key to reaching new prospects in a way that will convert them to satisfied patients. The strategy we use here at Stratasan, and one we highly recommend, is the methodology known as inbound marketing.

How Leaders Can Look Within for Answers

By Morgan Atkins

With healthcare reimbursement constantly changing, health systems and hospitals are searching for new revenue streams to diversify their income. Financial cuts, new regulations, and payer contract negotiations have pushed healthcare institutions to find new, creative ways to keep revenue flowing while still maintaining high quality care.

“Exploring diversified, innovative revenue streams” was listed as third most important issue of strategic importance in a recent survey of 146 C-suite executive. A Becker’s Hospital Review article covering this survey shared that “C-suite executives at both health systems and community hospitals are shifting their focus to nontraditional sources of growth rather than relying solely on conventional determinants of market share.”

Create Stress-Free, Data-Based Presentations

By Rebecca Groner and Tony Camarata

When you’re on a roll in the middle of a presentation, but get interrupted by a clarifying question—or realize you forgot a slide—you wish you could go back in time to fix it. Making sure all the right information is in your presentation is a difficult task in of itself, but the stress and anxiety that can come with presenting data to the C-suite can create an extra barrier to presentation success.

In this post, we discuss how to more effectively engage your team in strategy meetings and how to integrate new features available in Storyboards to do so. We’ll provide insight into why we designed these updates and how they work together to take the stress out of strategic planning presentations.

How Tanner Health Has Found Success Through Advanced Market Segmentation

By Kelly Meigs and Drake Jarman

Stratasan's Drake Jarman and Kelly Meigs of Tanner Health System led a breakfast session on “How to Create Planning and Marketing Initiatives Based on Real-Time Intelligence” at this year's GSHMPR Annual Conference. Attendees learned how, by geocoding internal patient data to the block group level, Tanner Health System can assess growth plans in real-time and pivot execution strategies as needed.

Download the slides from their presentation, here.

What They Are, How to Address Them, and How to Avoid Them

By Hank Neuhoff

Many hospitals and healthcare systems are challenged with having too many analyst needs and too few analysts to complete the work. The massive increase in available healthcare data and our insatiable desire to extract value from that data are both going to continue to grow.

With the increased need for analyst expertise and the shortage of analysts to do the work, we simply cannot afford the cost, time, or trauma of repeating classic analyst missteps. The purpose of this post is to highlight some of the common mistakes analysts make and address how to avoid them.

How to Create Simple, Actionable Maps that Inform Strategic Growth

By Jason Haley

A well-designed map can be an incredibly valuable tool for healthcare strategy, marketing, and planning. But sometimes, good maps can go bad; and bad maps can easily hurt more than they help. It has been a few years since our last “Bad Maps” post, so let’s have some fun and learn from the cartographic missteps of others!

Why the Benefits of Being Independent Can Outweigh Systemization

By Lee Ann Lambdin

Independent hospitals face undeniable challenges in today’s stressful, competitive healthcare environment. The estimated 1,609 independent hospitals in the U.S. must go at it alone in the world of declining reimbursement, increasing expenses, declining inpatient volume, new competition, and provider shortages. Consider these stats:

• In 2018, hospital consolidations were up 11% from the first quarter of 2017
• Since 2010, hospital mergers and acquisitions are up 75% from 66 transactions in 2010 to 115 in 2017
• More than 85 rural hospitals have closed since 2010 and those closures were spread across more than 26 states

In the face of these challenges, a 2011 to 2015 Definitive Healthcare analysis identified a concerning trend: only 143 out of around 1,450 independent hospitals could be classified as “high-performing,” based on a median operating margin of at least four percent.

The benefits of systemization are well touted: increased efficiency, lower costs, increased quality, economies of scale, increased access to capital, greater talent and intellectual resources, increased leverage with payers resulting in increased reimbursement. However, there is debate around how recent megamergers will fail, and on March 16, 2016, Paul B. Ginsberg, lauded economist, testified before the California Senate Committee on Health on fostering competition in consolidated markets and stated, “The research literature on hospital mergers is now substantial and shows that mergers lead to higher prices, although without any measured impact on quality.” In light of his testimony, we want to consider how stand-alone hospitals can succeed in today’s difficult healthcare environment. Being an independent hospital has advantages, and those must be used as the basis of short- and long-term strategic planning for success.

By Lee Ann Lambdin and Jason Haley

Refining Your Process for Better Marketing ROI and Growth Planning Success

Stay Safe this July 4th by Avoiding these Injury Trends/h3>

By Gavin Chance

Don’t become a statistic - stay safe this July 4th! In an effort to help you prepare for this holiday and avoid the most common accidents, we’ve researched fireworks injury data from the past five years. This is what we found:

• 72% of fireworks accidents occur at home
• Men are twice as likely to become injured as women
• 27.9% of injuries happen to children, ages 0-10 years old

Click-to-Tweet: Did you know? 72% of fireworks accidents occur at home, 11.75% occur in public, and 11% at a sporting event.

Interested in learning more, such as the most common diagnoses and where most injuries occur? Check out our infographic, below.