Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

2021 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 discussed how to widen outpatient planning opportunities, learned how to use reimbursement data when entering new markets, discovered how to access the latest population data for better strategic planning, and much more.

As we close out the year, we thought it'd be helpful to share our five most popular blog posts of 2021. 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.

Connecting Your Members with the Right CHNA Partner 

By Lee Ann Lambdin and Megan Reeves

A Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) identifies a community’s most significant health issues and needs through systematic data collection and analysis. Every three years, non-profit hospitals are required to submit a CHNA report and adopt an implementation plan to address the identified needs so they can maintain their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt or “charitable” status.

As 2022 quickly approaches, many of your member hospitals will be due to complete their new CHNA. In this post, we’ll discuss the ways you can help your members prepare for and navigate the CHNA process, including:

• Ensuring your members are clear on what they must do to stay federally compliant
• Finding ways to promote the real value that can be gained from a CHNA (beyond compliance)
• Offering resources to members who need help executing their CHNA 

The CHNA process may take several months and resources to complete, so now is the time for your member hospitals to be thinking about their 2022 CHNAs. Keep reading to learn how you can help.

How APCD Insights Can Empower Healthcare Growth Planners

By Charles Glover and Sean Conway

The trend toward outpatient healthcare is here to stay, and for several reasons revolving around cost savings. For starters, while outpatient facilities may vary in size and services offered, they are almost always less expensive to build than traditional hospitals. Second, without the need for extensive nursing units and housekeeping functions required within a hospital, they are more affordable to operate. Finally, staffing expenses are lower as offices are typically closed on nights and weekends.  

There are other factors driving the increase in outpatient care, including:

• Changes in insurance reimbursement rules, and the adoption of site-neutral payments, are incentivizing providers to rethink their care delivery strategy.  
• New technologies and better drugs have allowed medical tests, procedures, and therapies to be provided outside of acute care settings. (Rehab Insights)
• The easier access to care, along with the potential for lower out-of-pocket costs, has made outpatient care a popular choice for patients.

With all these pressures pushing the development of outpatient care, healthcare growth planners need solid strategies for tracking patient movement, leveraging trends in reimbursement, and addressing physician leakage. In this post, we’ll discuss which data is the right data for planners to use to access the critical information needed for informed outpatient planning.  

Be Equipped to Address the Fallout of this Legislation 

By Stephen Burgess, Ancore Health, and Michael Shipley, Stratasan

On July 1, 2021, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury, and the Office of Personnel Management issued an interim final rule to implement fundamental parts of the No Surprises Act (NSA). Despite the disarming title, the No Surprises Act will lead to many surprises, around lack of parity in reimbursements within a market. In upcoming years, payers and providers will be forced to evaluate their value proposition, market positioning, customer/patient transparency, and data analytics.

The NSA contains key protections to hold consumers harmless from the cost of unanticipated out-of-network medical bills. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “surprise bills lead the list of affordability concerns for many families; 2 in 3 adults say they worry about unexpected medical bills, more than the number worried about affording other health care or household expenses.  Surprise bills can number in the millions each year.”

While the major implications of the NSA will benefit consumers, the severity of impact that this legislation will have on payers and providers will depend on how they react. In this post, we’ve worked to summarize this new law and discuss some of the ways that both providers and payers can be prepared to act.

How to Succeed in the Midst of Challenging Dynamics

By Lee Ann Lambdin

Note: This post is an excerpt from my SHSMD 2021 conference presentation. You can download the slide deck from this presentation here.

It’s true, the COVID-19 pandemic has been unlike anything our healthcare system has seen in recent history. In many cases, teams have been short-staffed and budget dollars reallocated. How can growth departments rebound from such challenges, often with no additional resources? By learning from those familiar with overcoming similar obstacles. 

Staying nimble and adaptable in the face of challenges is something many veterans know how to do well. Experienced leaders are accustomed to making adjustments when there are unplanned changes, budget reductions, or higher demands on the same few resources. 

Over the past year, I’ve worked alongside and advised numerous Stratasan clients as they’ve navigated shifting priorities and supported their staff through COVID-19 related challenges. In this post, I’ll share how I’ve seen these hospitals respond and how we can all learn from their experiences.

I’ll also share some of Stratasan’s story of rebounding from loss. I’ll provide some of the insights we’ve learned on how to focus priorities, make risk/reward calculations, and automate more.

By Lee Ann Lambdin

The Society of Healthcare Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) annual conference is the biggest healthcare strategy conference nationwide. With the goal of changing and leading the future, it’s a must-attend event for healthcare marketing, communications, business development, and strategic planning professionals. Headed into its 25th year, SHSMD Connections 2021 is taking place in person on September 19-21 in San Antonio, TX, and virtually on October 20-21. 

SHSMD Connections is primarily focused on education and it provides many opportunities to learn best practices you can take home and share with your team. I’d like to personally invite you to the session I’ll be leading titled “Your Budget Has Been Slashed! Now What?” It’s taking place on Tuesday from 11-11:50 am. I hope to see you there!

This year, the conference theme is “It’s a New Future: Change it and Lead it,” based on how much has changed and will continue to change for those of us who work in the healthcare industry. With so many healthcare marketing, public relations and communications, and strategic planning professionals expected to be on-site, hours of educational sessions, and more than three hours with keynote speakers, this conference can easily be an enriching experience. However, it can also feel like you’re drinking from a fire hose.

The keynote sessions are always great, but this year I’m particularly excited to hear Derreck Kayongo, Entrepreneur, Global Soap Project Founder, CNN Hero, and Former CEO of the Center for Civil and Human Rights lead the opening talk. Our team was so looking forward to this event, that we decided to sponsor it, and will be offering free margaritas at our booth afterward. (Come say hello at booth #117!)

Key Considerations for Proactive Healthcare Planners

By Gavin Chance

Market transitions and population shifts can alter your service area. These changes can sometimes be subtle, but still come with noteworthy effects. It’s important to pay attention to the signs that indicate change and be ready to reassess your service area definitions when appropriate. In this post, we’ll discuss three important signs to watch for.

How Stratsan’s Data Process has Adapted to Maintain Data Integrity

By Megan Reeves 

New ICD and DRG codes are created every year by CMS. Why and how these codes are created and released is discussed in detail in this post. These diagnosis and procedure codes allow for:

• Easy storage, retrieval, and analysis of health information for evidence-based decision-making
• Sharing and comparing health information between hospitals, regions, settings, and countries
• Data comparisons in the same location across different time periods

They are usually released in the fall, with an announcement at the beginning of Q3. This allows healthcare providers to prepare and plan for any changes to come. Codes then typically go into effect October 1, the beginning of Q4 of that year.  

While there is a standard schedule and process for when and how codes are released, COVID-19 is a unique situation and has triggered the creation of new codes outside the normal process. Creating a new set of codes outside the standard way of doing so, can lead to issues. In this post, we’ll discuss one such issue that our team has noticed—the spike in invalid and ungroupable DRGs—and how we’re addressing this problem for our clients.

Access the Latest Population Data for Better Strategic Planning

By Megan Reeves

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released the 2020 Census results, triggering conversations among marketers and planners everywhere about changing market demographics. These results track the nation’s diversity and how we’re evolving.

Key takeaways from the 2020 Census include the following:

• The non-Hispanic white population nationwide got smaller, shrinking from 196 million in 2010 to 191 million in 2020
• Almost all of the growth of the past 10 years happened in metropolitan areas
• The share of children in the U.S. declined because of falling birth rates, while it grew for adults, driven by aging baby boomers
• The nation’s 7.4% growth rate over the decade, the smallest since the Great Depression, was largely propelled by a Hispanic boom
• Among all U.S. metro areas, the fastest-growing one was in The Villages, the Florida retirement community built on former cow pastures

For healthcare business development leaders, these population shifts should be a signal that it’s time to reevaluate their own market demographics, to ensure they’re set up to adequately meet the needs of their community. 

Stratasan, through the use of Esri's Tapestry Segmentation, is positioned to help in this endeavor.

Your Community Health Needs Assessment is complete with lots of community involvement.  Your community has assisted in prioritizing the most important health issues.  Your hospital has selected and prioritized the health issues and goals that it will work on, and has justifications for the issues it will not work on.  There is still one more requirement to be met: an implementation plan with monitoring and evaluation of efforts.  Stratasan suggests creating a Health Issues dashboard containing as much of the following information as possible.