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.

Making this Data Accessible and Usable for Informed Growth Planning

By Brian Dailey, Morgan Atkins, and Dave Sellers

Over the years as we’ve worked with all-payer claims data (APCD), and built tools on top of this dataset, we’ve often encountered questions about it— what it includes and how it can be used. In this post, we’ll address many of those frequently asked questions. We’ll define APCD and describe the longitudinal analysis that can be done using this data.

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.

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.

Key Learnings from our Conversations with Hospital Associations

By Megan Reeves 

Given our history serving the nation's top healthcare organizations, assisting them in processing data and using it to make growth decisions, we have unparalleled insight into the data needs of hospitals of all shapes and sizes. We know what matters to end-users of the data collection process and we’re able to apply our knowledge to the process as a whole to make it easier, more efficient, and with an output that is better for strategic decision making.  

In an effort to sharpen our understanding of state association needs and the state data aggregation process, we spent time connecting with associations across the nation. We wanted to learn more about the challenges they’re facing, and how we can better support their work. 

What we heard in these conversations reinforced our long-standing understanding that state data is complex, and aggregation is challenging, with requirements differing by state. 

The following are learnings we gleaned from these discussions, which covered a multitude of topics including partnerships, data types, release schedules, challenges facing members, and hopes for the future of hospital associations. We hope the insights gathered here highlight the hard work already being done, and some key opportunities for optimizing data in ways that would benefit both associations and their members.

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.

Improving the Process of Data Correction and Submission

By Steve Erro 

Stratasan’s tools were designed to help healthcare institutions grow with confidence. In order to deliver the best possible experience, we strive to always provide the following: 

1. Clarity through data transparency and a world-class data process
2. Confidence through technological expertise and comprehensive data insight
3. Support resulting from our dedication to a positive customer experience

Our commitment to these deliverables can be seen through the continued enhancement of our data aggregation and reporting platform, Star. Stratasan’s Star Platform is a web-based offering that enables state hospital associations to expedite the submission, validation, and aggregation of their member facilities’ data.

Star users gain access to trustworthy data, delivered faster and in a more complete and accurate format. This data can be reliably used to make sound market decisions.

In this post, we share more about the updates made to this tool and how they’re closely aligned with our goals to deliver a unique level of clarity, confidence, and support to our customers.

Tools to Revive your Planning Strategy 

By Lee Ann Lambdin 

With this final post in our series on how to adjust and renew your approach to strategic planning in the wake of COVID-19, we’re discussing what tools you can utilize to support your efforts. If you missed the first two posts, click here to learn how to effectively use 2020 data, and here for suggestions on how to refocus priorities upended by COVID-19.

If you’re at the point of revisiting your 2021 strategy, or taking steps to set the course for what strategy should look like post-COVID, then the tools shared in this post will help you along the way.

How to Refocus Priorities Upended by COVID-19

By Lee Ann Lambdin 

In our first edition of this blog series, Evaluating 2020 Data—Is It Useful or Not? we discussed how to approach and make sense of 2020 data and use it for strategic planning. In this post, we’ll build upon that idea and consider how strategic planners can adjust and refocus their priorities after a disruption of such magnitude as COVID-19.

How can strategic planners start again? By moving forward in the face of many unknowns and building a new strategy based on a year of data irregularities. The insights shared here will hopefully provide a starting point to do so.

Evaluating 2020 Data—Is it Useful or Not?

By Lee Ann Lambdin 

When 2020 budgets and strategic plans were set in the fall of 2019, no one could have imagined that by the following March, they’d be useless. Plans created for 2021 may be no better off, as they were established in the midst of a pandemic. How can strategic planners start again? What data and analytics should be used when 2020 trending is out of the question?

This is the first post of a series where we’ll discuss how strategic planners can regain focus, make sense of the data collected during COVID-19, and approach planning for the future. In this post, we’ll discuss how to approach 2020 data differently. In the next two posts, we’ll offer some actionable advice. 

Let’s dive in and talk about how to reconcile 2020 data and use it effectively in strategic planning.