Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

Stay Safe this July 4th by Avoiding these Injury Trends

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.

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.

How Small Hospital Planners and Marketers can Manage Multiple Responsibilities within One Role

By Hank Neuhoff

For planners and marketers at small or independent hospital systems, prioritization can be one of the greatest challenges. Many who have “Marketing” in their title are also responsible for planning and strategy as well, and it’s apparent that this phenomenon is due to one of two things:

• Strategy has increasingly become a more important function for the hospital or health system so this job was given to the department that made the most sense: marketing.
• Or, the planning position was eliminated over time and the function was consolidated with the marketing function.

Regardless of why or how things progressed in the way they did, one thing is certain; planners and marketers in these situations must be strategic in their efforts and find ways to accomplish more work with fewer resources. In this post, we’ll offer some tips and suggestions on how this can be done.

Learning SQL and a Smattering of Python

By Scott Burns

I want to let you in on a little secret: our product, strategic resources group (SRG), and data services team members are the real healthcare experts here at Stratasan.

Our team of developers are pros at what they do: running data warehouses and computing infrastructure that our applications use to store and analyze complex healthcare datasets. But we rely heavily on the expertise of our team members to prioritize what needs to be developed within our applications.

Based on their direction, we learn what our customers are asking for and then determine what new features and products to build. Working hand in hand, our teams create useful tools that can derive insightful meaning from healthcare data.

Recognizing the need to close the gap between our development know-how and their healthcare insight, we’ve taken steps to improve the flow of communication between our teams and proactively facilitate interdepartmental collaboration. Our goal is to decrease the time it takes to get a product to market so we can more efficiently address the needs and goals of our partners.

A Look Behind the Curtain at Stratasan’s APCD Payment by CPT Code Report

By Becca Groner

For many hospitals, competitor payment information can be complex to decipher due to a lack of access to clear, aggregated payment data. Because of this, many of our partners lack the insight they need to effectively navigate preferred payer negotiations and service line expansion efforts. Often, teams don’t have access to actual reimbursements beyond Medicare and EMR data. This means they don’t have the critical intelligence they need, which can be derived from all-payer claims data (APCD).

In this post, we’ll discuss why hospitals need a better solution, why APCD provides helpful insight, and what steps strategic planners can take to access this critical intelligence.

Uncover the Fundamental Truths Your APCD Should Deliver

By Morgan Atkins and Daniel Dreaden

Not all APCD (all-payer claims data) is created equally. Depending on the data aggregator and clearinghouse 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.

How Long Will You Wait for Care?

By Dave Sellers

Emergency departments are responsible for about half of all hospital admissions, according to a RAND Corporation study. In fact, more people step into ERs every year, with visits hitting 136 million in 2015, up from 97 million in 1995, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Meanwhile, the number of emergency departments is down about 11% over that same time period. As a result, many people in need of emergency care are waiting longer to see a doctor.

Aware of these stats, we were curious about how long patients are really waiting to be seen. This infographic shares what we learned as we analyzed trends in ER wait times around the United States. Highlights include:

• In the most extreme cases, the percentage of patients who leave before being seen is 18%, whereas the national average is 2%.

• For facilities with the highest proportion of people leaving before being seen, 75% have wait times more than
  two times the national average for patients who choose to wait to be seen.

• There are shorter wait times to see a physician at Critical Access Hospitals, a trend that is in line with lower wait times in more rural locations which is where CAH’s are located.

• Residents of metro area and states with large population centers will likely wait quite a while to see a medical professional, be evaluated for admission, and get to a room, should they need to. 

See Better Results with A Year-Round Planning Process

By Jason Moore

Hospitals have traditionally created an annual strategic plan as a roadmap for achieving growth goals. While well-intentioned and inspiring, this form of planning often fails to produce meaningful results, leading many to question its value. Why repeat a process that doesn’t produce strong results?

Additionally, this routine is greatly driven by annual data reporting—a factor that is changing due to increased adoption of the more frequently updated all-payer claims data (APCD). Stratasan’s APCD updates monthly, for example, allowing for more frequent market reporting that can lead to plan adjustments.

There is also reason to believe that plans will be more widely adopted when more members of the organization are invested in the process. This can be a difficult change in mindset for organizations accustomed to planning that takes place only at the c-suite level.

How can hospitals shift to take advantage of more readily available data insights, ensure greater adoption, and see system growth? The answer is an iterative planning process that invites organization-wide input and applies data-backed market insights.

The Secrets of the DIKW Pyramid

By Jason Moore

Have you heard of the DIKW pyramid?  If not, you’re not alone. But if you’re up for a refreshing shift in perspective on how to make data-driven decisions, then read on.

Within the healthcare landscape, change is constant. As a result, growth departments — whether they be strategic planning, marketing, business development, or physician relations — must make informed, data-driven decisions that can keep pace with the rate of change. Stratasan views the DIKW pyramid as the best and most philosophically accurate way for leaders to make these decisions.