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.

Level the Playing Field for More Productive Negotiations

By Jennifer Keller

There’s a discussion across healthcare about the need for greater price transparency. The talk is about whether or not patients should know the hard costs of medical procedures and how much they can expect to pay out of pocket for medical services. Armed with this information, they can shop around for care that fits their quality standards as well as their budget. 

At Stratasan, we feel there’s another layer of healthcare price transparency that’s needed—transparency that can level the playing field in provider-payer reimbursement negotiations. Both providers and payers are in need of more data to inform their negotiating position.

Leverage Adjustable Confidence Scoring for Empowered Payer Negotiations

By Hannah Killian and James Porter

In survey research¹, a confidence level is applied to express how confident a researcher is in the data obtained from a population sample. A confidence level lets someone know if they can trust the research data to make decisions. 

Similarly, a confidence level (or score), when applied to all-payer claims data (APCD), indicates the trustworthiness of this data for making healthcare decisions. It’s a metric that ensures integrity and can empower a provider to use this data with greater assurance. 

Greater data confidence can be useful when pursuing a number of healthcare planning initiatives. In this post, we’ll discuss specifically how an adjustable confidence-scoring system is valuable when preparing for provider-payer reimbursement negotiations. Equipped with this tool, providers can:

1. Experience data with certainty, knowing that the cleaning and curation work has already been done 
2. Apply their intuition, since variability can be adjusted to allow for the application of local knowledge
3. Approach negotiations empowered by data insights, assured that the data they’re relying upon to make decisions is trustworthy

Let's get started discussing each of these factors in more detail. 

Tips for Shifting to a More Aggressive Virtual Care Growth Strategy

By Lee Ann Lambdin

Hospitals and caregivers across the country have pivoted to virtual care in response to COVID-19. It's opened the door for telehealth growth in ways we've never seen before. We’ve witnessed a rapid shift from a previously deliberate adoption path to a record pace of uptake. 

“Telehealth is bridging the gap between people, physicians, and health systems, enabling everyone, especially symptomatic patients, to stay at home and communicate with physicians through virtual channels, helping to reduce the spread of the virus to mass populations and the medical staff on the frontlines,” said Dedi Gilad, CEO, and co-founder of Tyto Care, a telehealth technology company, in this Healthcare IT News article. 

It's likely that this adoption to virtual care is here to stay, as patients will expect it to continue to be an option for care delivery in the future. So, how can hospital planners prepare for a change in strategy in light of our collective embrace of virtual technologies?