Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

Stratasan’s Physician Patterns to Offer Expanded Physician Referral Insights

By Dave Sellers and Jason Haley

As you may have heard, CMS Administrator Seema Verma announced that The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is making Medicare Advantage encounter data, which covers provider identifiers, diagnoses and date and type of service, available for the first time to researchers.

This new effort is part of the CMS and White House patient data collaboration, known as MyHealtheData. CMS also plans to encourage Medicare Advantage programs to use release platforms that meet the capabilities of CMS' Blue Button 2.0 feature, which allows patients to access their own claims data. A patient-centered system requires focus on "data, quality data, cost data, a patient's own data," Vema shared.

How does this update affect Stratasan customers, and particularly, those in Medicare-only states: Alabama, Arkansas, South Dakota, Idaho, and Hawaii?

Health:Further - The Future of Health Podcast

By Jason Moore

The Pros and Cons of 5 Software Solutions

By Jason Haley

As you probably know by now, here at Stratasan we LOVE using maps! They are one of our most valuable data visualization tools and resources.

• You can turn a 200 page spreadsheet into a easy-to-digest one-page map that anyone can intuitively understand—and derive great value from—just by looking at it.
• Through Launch Pathway’s Storyboard feature, insightful maps of your facility can be added to presentation-ready decks within minutes, providing the setup for more meaningful meeting discussions.
• We recognize the value that a properly created map can provide when looking to identify patient outmigration, physician loyalties, and service area opportunities for growth.

When an organization decides it’s ready to get into the mapping space, they can quickly become overwhelmed with the various mapping software options and the large price gaps between them. If you are looking for or considering investing in a mapping platform for your team, here’s a list of the options along with our recommendations.

For each of the options below, we outline pros, cons, and pricing. Furthermore, we provide our recommendations for the various platforms based on needs and budgets. So, without further adieu, let’s get mappy!

By Lee Ann Lambdin

As a healthcare strategic planner, your time is both limited and valuable. Planning departments are shrinking with the evolution of decision support departments. Strategic planners and marketers alike are facing a new reality that requires them to do more with less. Many who have planning and strategy in their title are responsible for marketing as well. This is due to one of two things:

• Either there was never a planning position at all or 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. This is often the case in small systems and independent hospitals, where one person is faced with juggling multiple roles.
  

By Jason Haley

For the sixth, and final, installment of our tapestry series, we’ll be covering Tapestry Segments in three differing LifeModes. (You can read the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth posts here.) 

Since this last post is covering three LifeModes that are unrelated, it will be structured a little differently than the first five posts in this series. We’ll cover a large swath of Urbanization Groups, then specifically dive into each of the three LifeModes separately. Each of the LifeModes will utilize healthcare differently than the next, so we’ll look at each section individually,rather than wholistically, like we have in the past.

It has been a lot of fun covering Tapestry Segmentation throughout this blog series and our hope is that you not only know more than you did when we started, but also how you can utilize Psychographic data to your advantage within your markets and patient populations! If you have any questions about Tapestry Segmentation that these posts have not answered, you are more than welcome to reach out to me directly at jhaley@stratasan.com.

Before we dive into the last post, here’s a quick Tapestry refresher: Tapestry Segmentation was designed specifically for understanding your customer’s lifestyle choices —what they buy and how they spend their free time. This information gives Stratasan, and you, our clients, insights that help identify a facility’s patient types, optimal sites for hospitals, physician offices, FSERS, and urgent care locations. We use the Tapestry Segmentation dataset to help our clients get higher response rates, focus on the most profitable growth opportunities, and invest their resources in the best ways possible.

By Jason Haley

For the fifth installment of our tapestry series, we’ll be covering Tapestry Segments in the City.

(Note: you can read the first, second, third, fourth, and sixth posts here.)

This post (as well as the previous post) specifically highlights Tapestry Segments in LifeModes in America’s urban core. This post includes urban LifeModes predominantly made up of Ethnic Enclaves and Next Wave populations. Households in these Segments are made up of young, mobile, and diverse populations living in the most densely populated neighborhoods of the largest cities. As these populations get older and start families, they begin to move to neighborhoods that flank major cities as well as affluent suburbs. They will also begin to utilize health care more and more. By targeting these LifeModes, a healthcare organization can hone in on areas where the growth of healthcare needs can be expected in the future and plan accordingly.

Before we dive into the rest of this post, here’s a quick Tapestry refresher: Tapestry Segmentation was designed specifically for understanding your customer’s lifestyle choices —what they buy and how they spend their free time. This information gives Stratasan, and our clients, insights that help identify a facility’s patient types, optimal sites for hospitals, physician offices, FSERS, and urgent care locations. We use the Tapestry Segmentation dataset to help our clients get higher response rates, focus on the most profitable growth opportunities, and invest their resources in the best ways possible.

By Scott Burns, and Corey Robertson, and Lisa French

As we’ve approached the release of our newest software, Launch Pathway, we have blogged about how Launch Pathway compares to other business intelligence tools, why data visualization is so important, and why hospitals and health systems should focus on the right data over big data.

Now in this post, a few members of our development team are taking the opportunity to share some of what they experienced while building this new software. As developers, this post is partly a love letter to the Stratasan tools and also an opportunity to share our philosophy on iteratively delivering large projects. With that in mind, we hope you enjoy.

By Jason Haley

For the fourth installment of our tapestry series, we’ll be covering Tapestry Segments in the City.

(Note: you can read the first, second, third, fifth, and sixth posts here.)

This post (as well as the next) will specifically highlight Tapestry Segments in LifeModes in America’s urban core. Since there are so many urban segments, we’ll be covering them over two posts. This first post will include urban LifeModes predominantly made up of white and black populations. Households in these Segments are made up of people ages 28-47 years old. As these populations age into their 30s and 40s, they will begin to utilize health care more and more. By targeting these LifeModes, a healthcare organization can hone in on areas where the growth of healthcare needs can be expected in the future and plan accordingly.

Before we dive into the rest of this post, here’s a quick Tapestry refresher: Tapestry Segmentation was designed specifically for understanding your customer’s lifestyle choices —what they buy and how they spend their free time. This information gives Stratasan, and our clients, insights that help identify a facility’s patient types, optimal sites for hospitals, physician offices, FSERS, and urgent care locations. We use the Tapestry Segmentation dataset to help our clients get higher response rates, focus on the most profitable growth opportunities, and invest their resources in the best ways possible.

Why Each Platform was Created and the Unique Needs and Goals of Each User

By Tony Camarata, Scott Burns, and Forrest Rich

As we approached the official release date of Launch Pathway, we found it helpful to consider other platforms on the market that provide a similar set of offerings. We analyzed and researched our customer’s needs and the options previously available to them so we have a more complete understanding of how Launch Pathway will be useful and relevant to our customers. Based on our market research, these are the three primary options available to healthcare marketers and strategists looking to apply data intelligence to strategic growth planning:

• An in-house DIY approach
• Tableau
• Launch Pathway

We won’t cover the details of an in-house DIY approach in this post, but we’ll instead focus on the differences between Tableau and Launch Pathway. Launch Pathway is strategic intelligence platform that transforms complex healthcare market data into straightforward insights. It removes the roadblocks of data crunching for healthcare marketing and strategic planning professionals, allowing users to more quickly progress to the high-value work of growth strategy and planning. Tableau was created to help anyone see and understand their data, whatever that data might be. It connects to almost any database, allowing for the creation of drag and drop to visualizations.

We know both Tableau and Launch Pathway have a lot of great capabilities, so we’re not interested in detailing out every good and bad aspect of each platform. But, we do see value in highlighting the strategy behind why each was created, who the users are of each, and what these users are trying to accomplish.

By Taylor Smith and Anusha Achukola

As we saw in last week’s blog post, many hospitals and healthcare systems are challenged with having too many analyst needs and too few analysts to complete all the work. As an in-house analyst—working on your own or as a part of a team—you are likely facing a long queue of requests and wishing you could somehow find a better solution to keep up with the demand.

As the amount of data that healthcare organizations collect continues to grow at a rapid rate, the volume of information you and your team will be tasked with analyzing will only continue to grow as well. Without the right tools and workflows, you will continue to struggle to balance it all. 

In last week’s post we outlined a few suggestions for how to overcome the ongoing healthcare analyst shortage. In this post, we’ll address this same issue—but from your perspective.

Specifically, if you are an analyst buried under a pile of reports to be done, we’ve got some practical ways you can update your workflow and manage your work queue—getting more done in less time and with fewer errors.