Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

Improve Your Negotiation Strategy and Establish Favorable Market Rates

By Jennifer Keller

When talking to clients in the midst of scaling operations in a new market, the question of how to establish attractive market rates often comes up. Entering a new market with rates too high can be a deterrent for growth and setting the right rates can be challenging.

The right data, insights, and tools are key to identifying the sweet spot when setting rates and planning for payer negotiations.  

Often, payer negotiations are driven by a team’s working knowledge of the market rates, or based on insufficient input from outside consultants. In this post, we’ll discuss how to use reimbursement data effectively when entering new markets and preparing for negotiations. 

We’ll discuss what data is needed, what new insights can be found, and how the right data can help your organization grow more successfully.

Tags: healthcare strategic growth, market research analysis, market reimbursement analyzer, reimbursement

2020 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 uncovered innovative solutions to the healthcare revenue crisis, learned how to identify service line opportunities, discovered how new diagnosis and procedure codes are created, and much more.

As we close out the year, we thought it'd be helpful to share our five most popular blog posts of 2020. 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.

Tags: Blog, strategic growth, health care, healthcare, healthcare strategic growth, 2020

We hope it’s been an incredible year of learning through Stratasan's Strategic Growth blog series. We said goodbye to a dear friend, learned the secrets of the DIKW pyramid, uncovered innovative solutions to the healthcare revenue crisis, and much more.

As we close out the year, we thought it would be helpful to share the five most popular blog posts from 2019. These posts received the most views and seemed to provide useful growth guidance to you, our readers. If you’re traveling over the holidays or just enjoying some downtime before the new year begins, check out these posts that you may have missed or revisit your favorites for fresh insight.

 

Tags: Blog, strategic growth, health care, healthcare, healthcare strategic growth, 2019

We hope it’s been an incredible year of growth and learning through Stratasan's Strategic Growth blog series. We’ve learned how to apply the principles of “good strategy” to our annual planning, outlined how to achieve organizational alignment, and discussed how to thrive as an independent hospital in challenging healthcare times.

As we close out the year, we thought it would be helpful to share the 5 most popular blog posts from 2018. These posts received the most hits and seemed to provide the most helpful growth guidance to you, our readers. If you’re traveling over the holidays or just enjoying some downtime before the new year begins, this is a great way to review helpful blog posts that you may have missed or revisit your favorites for fresh insight.

 

Tags: Blog, physician relations, strategic growth, health care, healthcare, healthcare marketing, healthcare strategic growth, marketing, software, healthcare service area, physician recrutiment, service area, 2018

Create Stress-Free, Data-Based Presentations

By Rebecca Groner and Tony Camarata

When you’re on a roll in the middle of a presentation, but get interrupted by a clarifying question—or realize you forgot a slide—you wish you could go back in time to fix it. Making sure all the right information is in your presentation is a difficult task in of itself, but the stress and anxiety that can come with presenting data to the C-suite can create an extra barrier to presentation success.

In this post, we discuss how to more effectively engage your team in strategy meetings and how to integrate new features available in Storyboards to do so. We’ll provide insight into why we designed these updates and how they work together to take the stress out of strategic planning presentations.

Tags: strategic positioning, healthcare strategic growth, healthcare strategic planning, hospital strategic growth, presentations, data presentation, live meeting facilitation, storyboards, strategy meeting

Why the Benefits of Being Independent Can Outweigh Systemization

By Lee Ann Lambdin

Independent hospitals face undeniable challenges in today’s stressful, competitive healthcare environment. The estimated 1,609 independent hospitals in the U.S. must go at it alone in the world of declining reimbursement, increasing expenses, declining inpatient volume, new competition, and provider shortages. Consider these stats:

• In 2018, hospital consolidations were up 11% from the first quarter of 2017
• Since 2010, hospital mergers and acquisitions are up 75% from 66 transactions in 2010 to 115 in 2017
• More than 85 rural hospitals have closed since 2010 and those closures were spread across more than 26 states

In the face of these challenges, a 2011 to 2015 Definitive Healthcare analysis identified a concerning trend: only 143 out of around 1,450 independent hospitals could be classified as “high-performing,” based on a median operating margin of at least four percent.

The benefits of systemization are well touted: increased efficiency, lower costs, increased quality, economies of scale, increased access to capital, greater talent and intellectual resources, increased leverage with payers resulting in increased reimbursement. However, there is debate around how recent megamergers will fail, and on March 16, 2016, Paul B. Ginsberg, lauded economist, testified before the California Senate Committee on Health on fostering competition in consolidated markets and stated, “The research literature on hospital mergers is now substantial and shows that mergers lead to higher prices, although without any measured impact on quality.” In light of his testimony, we want to consider how stand-alone hospitals can succeed in today’s difficult healthcare environment. Being an independent hospital has advantages, and those must be used as the basis of short- and long-term strategic planning for success.

Tags: healthcare strategic growth, strategic growth plan, hospital growth, independent hospital, community hospital, rural hospital

Tags: strategic growth, strategic growth planning, healthcare, healthcare strategic growth, service area growth, data analyst, healthcare analyst, success story

By Lee Ann Lambdin, Taylor Smith, and Jackie DeGroat

Why It’s Critical for Measuring Progress, Driving Growth, and Meeting Goals

A Playbook for Independent Hospitals and Small Health Systems

Most marketing, strategic planning, and physician relations teams recognize the value of tracking the ROI of their outreach efforts, but it's challenging to do. This is especially true for independent hospitals and small health systems.

But for these smaller healthcare providers, it's especially important that they strategize and track success in tandem, because they don't have the money or bandwidth to duplicate efforts, nor the support of a corporate office or hospital support center.

Tags: strategic growth, strategic growth planning, healthcare, healthcare strategic growth, analytics partner, healthcare service area, service area growth, data analyst, healthcare analyst

We hope it’s been a wonderful year of growth and learning through Stratasan's Strategic Growth blog series. As we close out the year, we thought it would be helpful to share the 5 most popular blog posts from 2017. These posts received the most hits and seemed to provide the most helpful strategic growth guidance to you, our readers.

If you’re traveling over the holidays, this is a great way to review helpful blog posts that you may have missed or revisit your favorites for fresh insight.

 

Tags: Blog, physician relations, strategic growth, health care, healthcare, healthcare marketing, healthcare strategic growth, marketing, software, healthcare service area, physician recrutiment, service area, 2017

By Tony Camarata

Is your healthcare system failing to meet annual strategic goals due to a lack of organizational alignment? Studies show that the highest-performing healthcare organizations have a strategic plan that sets a clear direction for all functional teams. This plan succeeds or fails depending upon organization-wide understanding of the goals, tactics, and measurable outcomes needed to fulfill the strategic goals. Conversely, if your team is unable to establish alignment, your health system risks stagnation and year-over-year frustration about your inability to meet goals and expectations.  

Here’s a look at how to improve your hospital’s organizational alignment from top to bottom and why getting this right could be the key to meeting your annual strategic goals.

Tags: strategic growth, strategic growth planning, strategic planners, strategic planning, data, healthcare, healthcare strategic growth, alignment