Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

Combat the Trends and Get Patients the Care they Need

By Daniel Dreaden

Research shows that regular check-ins with a primary care provider can lead to the early detection of major healthcare concerns. It can also keep chronic problems like diabetes, asthma, and congestive heart failure from turning into emergencies and costly hospital stays. And yet, nearly half of all Americans say they or someone they live with has delayed care since the onslaught of coronavirus, according to a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

While fears of COVID continue to be, not surprisingly, a major factor keeping patients from visiting their doctor, there are other concerns to be considered as well. A Zocdoc survey shows that Americans across the board—especially Millennials—are dropping out of healthcare. These stats may surprise you:

by Lee Ann Lambdin

I hired a great analyst a few years ago. She was skilled with database programs, understood the complexities of the healthcare market, and had previously been a medical records coder—in short, she was very talented. The longer she was in her position, the more our state data was reported accurately and on a reliable schedule. It was a huge win for me and my team!

Recognizing her capabilities, I asked if she could start running "quarterly standard reports" that present key findings which could influence how our planning, marketing, and business development departments would function and what we would focus on in the weeks and months to come. These quarterly updates would be high-level summaries of our market landscape and would cover everything from our hospital’s market share, trended volume, competitor positions, product lines, payor mix, patient migration patterns and more. 

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.

How to Grow and Stay Relevant in the Evolving Healthcare Space

By Morgan Atkins and Daniel Dreaden

It has been predicted that 2019 will be marked by many changes in the healthcare industry. The progression towards more cost effective and convenient healthcare will continue to motivate mergers and acquisitions that will disrupt the status quo and alter the way consumers interface with this industry.

"In overwhelming numbers, consumers are willing to abandon old [healthcare] models for more efficient, convenient care… We are seeing this go far beyond flu shots." Ceci Connolly, managing director of PwC's Health Research Institute, said during a webinar on the study.

The shifting dynamics of healthcare will continue to drive providers of all sizes to remain flexible and open to new possibilities. Here are four ways hospitals can embrace these changes, stay competitive, and see growth in 2019.

Design Thinking, Authentic Demand, and More

By Hank Neuhoff, Stephanie Johnson, and Morgan Atkins

Opioid addiction apps, acuity-adaptable rooms to insertable cardiac monitors, and virtual reality for pediatric patients are among the technology-related issues that healthcare leaders should pay close attention to this year, according to the ECRI Institute's 2018 Top 10 Hospital C-suite Watch List. With the rapidly changing healthcare landscape, it's getting harder to anticipate what’s next. We understand the challenges that come with keeping pace with developing technologies, changing care trends, and evolving patient needs. Yet we also recognize how paramount change is to progress. We strive to be trailblazers in the healthcare space, developing innovative tools and services that address our clients' growth goals.

Practical Tips for Maintaining a Growth Mindset in your Organization

By Morgan Atkins

Stratasan understands how paramount change is to progress. We strive to be trailblazers in the healthcare space, developing innovative tools and services that address our clients' growth goals. The best way we can effectively lead our clients and provide value is by innovative thinking that challenges the status quo. Our goal is to empower our customers with the strategies that will equip them to more effectively face a challenging and ever-evolving healthcare industry.

At the heart of innovation is the ability to reframe your perspective. Henry Ford once said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Often, the question itself limits what you think the possibilities are. If you have an open mind about the possibilities, you maximize your chances of building effective and unexpected solutions.

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.

with Christian Nicholl, and Hank Neuhoff

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The Affordable Care Act was implemented to ensure that patients would have access to affordable, high quality, and safe healthcare. Regulations and measures were put in place to make certain that hospitals were meeting these newly implemented standards of care and safety. These standards, known as the Health-Acquired Conditions (HAC) requirements, have led to more in-depth scrutiny into whether hospitals are truly doing everything they can to reduce preventable infections and patient death through unnecessary complications.

Recently there have been many concerns regarding the use rate decline of inpatient discharges. In this post we will discuss where and by how much Medicare inpatient use rates are declining across the United States.

Recently, we performed an analysis for a customer on cardiac services trends.  Based on previous studies, we knew cardiac inpatient services were declining overall.  However, we discovered that inside cardiac services many of the sub-service lines behave quite differently; many declining but some actually increasing.  We analyzed all-payer data from Florida, Texas and California alongside full U.S. Medicare data and discovered a deeper understanding than “inpatient cardiac services are declining.”