Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

Utilization and Value in the Wake of an FSER Boom

By Morgan Atkins

Over the last several years, freestanding emergency rooms (FSERs) have seen a boom in popularity. FSERs provide 24/7 emergency care and are physically separate from a hospital campus. The allure of these offsite emergency departments stems from their potential to increase access to healthcare resources. However, FSERs are falling under scrutiny for the lack of price transparency and their tendency to operate in more affluent, populated areas.

Florida's state health regulatory entity, the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), provides publicly available data on emergency room visits for the state of Florida. The AHCA data provides a field to differentiate which emergency visits occurred at a hospital-based ER and those at a FSER. Stratasan has analyzed the impact and utilization of FSERs to determine if they are providing a benefit to the communities they serve. Check out our infographic to find out what we learned.

Tell a More Powerful Data Story with the Right Use of Color

By Morgan Atkins 

TED speakers David Grady and Jason Fried share in this infographic that organizations hold more than 3 billion meetings each year and executives spend 40–50 percent of their working hours—or twenty-three hours per week—in meetings. As a healthcare marketer or strategic planner, you can likely relate to these statistics, as you spend much of your time preparing for, leading, or following up on meetings. 

The presentations you create for your meetings can have a major impact on how successful your meetings will be. When your meetings include the delivery of data-based insights, it is especially important for your presentations to include well-designed, colorful visualizations.

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 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. 

A Look At the Healthiest and Unhealthiest ZIPs in the US

By Gavin Chance 

As we begin a new year, health and wellness are top of mind for many. Americans everywhere are setting New Year’s resolutions to amend bad habits and to lead a healthier, happier lifestyle in 2019.

It can be beneficial to understand the current state of our health as we collectively look to the future and make plans for improvement. This infographic shares statistics and trends about our health as a country, focusing on the following information from 2018:

• The average amount spent on health

• The average number of visits to the doctor

• The number of cigarettes smoked

• The average amount spent on prescription drugs

Statistics and Trends for Healthcare Providers: What to Know and How to Help

By Dave Sellers

What is the U.S. Opioid Epidemic?
(as defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)

In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to opioid pain relievers and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates. Increased prescription of opioid medications led to widespread misuse of both prescription and non-prescription opioids before it became clear that these medications could indeed be highly addictive. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis to be a public health emergency.

Our infographic shares statistics and trends resulting from this crisis and is based on <our all-payer claims data(APCD), highlighting the time period of Q3 2015 to Q2 2018. Many of these trends are both startling and very concerning. For instance, during this nearly three year time frame:

Year One in Review—A Highlight Reel of Launch Pathway’s Best Content

By Drake Jarman and Sean Conway

It’s been exactly one year since we debuted Launch Pathway on the Stratasan blog. With that anniversary in mind, we saw an opportunity to highlight some of our best content and insights from this first year. Additionally, we’ve created a video which summarizes Launch Pathway’s features and benefits, with a high level explanation of how this tool can revolutionize your strategic planning efforts.

Watch the video here.

By Tony Camarata

Has this ever happened to you? You walk into a strategy meeting with your strategic plan, ready to plan for the future, but walk out with a long list of to-dos instead? The meeting that was supposed to be used to chart your future growth strategy is spent asking and attempting to answer questions about past performance. Your organization’s key stakeholders need to know more insight into certain figures and also have requested intelligence that wasn’t prepared in advance, but they are not the right audience to jump into Excel pivot tables.

Storyboards will eliminate this problem with live meeting facilitations.

Launch Pathway is a data visualization tool that lives on top of state data. The Storyboards feature enables you to take snapshots of market share, service lines, payor mix, and maps of your facility and add them to presentation-ready decks within minutes, all within the application.

By Scott Burns

When our product team originally conceived Launch Pathway, the benefits stemming from the feature now known as Storyboards was at the forefront. As we have learned in our 6 years at Stratasan, often times product design is improved when starting with the end in mind. Our basic goals for Storyboards were to be able to save snapshots of data and visualizations, edit your story or presentation, and have each storyboard presentation automatically refresh with each new data release.

More specifically, the main model of Storyboards is an ordered collections of snapshots, each of which can exist in multiple storyboards at a time (referred to as a many-to-many relationship). As we worked through a variety of design and functionality ideas, we came to the point where we knew if the end user could not save a snapshot quickly and efficiently all other functions would be moot. A breakthrough occurred when our Product Captain, Morgan Atkins, suggested Pinterest as a place for inspiration for this functionality.

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.