Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

Effectively Leverage Your Data for Maximum Growth Insights

By Angelo Vibar, Tony Camarata and Dave Sellers

Are you asking the wrong questions of the right data; or the right questions of the wrong data? Most healthcare strategic planners understand the value of using data for informed decision making, but many don’t know how to effectively use data—or when to acquire new data—to find the answers they need.

When looking to assess market share or performance, you may feel the datasets you already have access to will provide the answers you need. But what if you don’t have the right data to answer these particular questions? Using the wrong data, you may miss important segments of your population in your analysis and risk using out-of-date or inconsistent data. A new data set all together may be needed to properly address the issues at hand.

There is also great value in being able to trust your data so you can be confident in your decision making. As hospital leaders face mounting financial and operational challenges, it’s critical to have tools that can consolidate and visualize healthcare market data—offering a source of common truth—and speed up the data analysis process. A source of common truth can unify departments around growth goals, metrics, and reliable market intelligence.

Identify How Stratasan’s Software Can Most Effectively Meet Your Needs

Is your team equipped with the right tools to analyze data and execute your strategic plan? Do you have access to the expertise you need when looking to identify growth opportunities? Take this short quiz and identify which tools and services can improve your team alignment and promote strategic thinking.

With this quiz you'll receive:

• Immediate feedback about which of Stratasan's software and services are the right fit for your needs
• Answers about where to turn for improved data intelligence
• Insights about how to more effectively align your team and see growth results

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.

Understand How this Data is Collected and How to Use it for Growth

By Haley Attridge, Mike McDonald, and Megan Reeves

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

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 or access the whole series here.) 

Download the Entire Series 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 holistically, 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 Tapestry Segmentation 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 or access the whole series here.)

Download the Complete Series 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 Tapestry Segmentation to help our clients get higher response rates, focus on the most profitable growth opportunities, and invest their resources in the best ways possible.