During a May 2021 webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by Syntellis, industry leaders discussed how to reduce costs and improve quality outcomes by using data more collaboratively.
The speakers were:
- Jay Spence, vice president of healthcare strategic solutions at Syntellis
- Amy Wolfelt, senior solutions engineer at Syntellis
Here are five takeaways from the webinar.
1. Healthcare organizations, which are juggling the COVID-19 pandemic, competitive threats, a transition from fee-for-service medicine and accelerating costs, are truly "multi-tasking" organizations, Mr. Spence said. Top of mind for most is cost transformation; however, 75 percent of healthcare providers have missed their cost reduction goals and achieved only partial or none of their cost reduction targets, according to Kaufman Hall data.
2. Organizations historically have focused their cost transformation efforts on margin improvement in areas like labor, supply chain and revenue cycle. In the future, healthcare organizations increasingly will need to focus on areas that require greater coordination across finance, clinical and operational leaders.
3. Cost transformation offers a competitive advantage for finance leaders who can engage with their clinical team through data. Mr. Spence said there are four stages to advanced costing:
- Prioritize data integration and migrations
- Establish a foundation with an end-to-end process
- Introduce advanced costing methods
- Extend advanced costing to high-value areas
4. To engage clinical teams in cost and quality improvement goals, it's important for healthcare leaders to establish a performance improvement "mindset," Ms. Wolfelt said. Surveys suggest there is a real opportunity for healthcare organizations to better engage their clinical leaders with accurate and usable data related to cost and quality.
5. What does quality data that drives patient outcomes look like? It should be standardized, trusted, actionable, transparent and drillable, and severity- and risk-adjusted, Ms. Wolfelt said.
To learn more about Syntellis, click here.To watch the webinar, click here.