A Roadmap to the Cost of Care

A 2013 Harvard Business Review article by Michael Porter and Thomas H. Lee shared the perspective that, “Without understanding the true costs of care for patient conditions, much less how costs are related to outcomes, health care organizations are flying blind in deciding how to improve processes and redesign care.”

Traditional healthcare cost accounting methods were not designed for value-based payment. Healthcare organizations require the ability to drill down into the costs associated with bundled services, specific patient groups, or practice patterns. With this information, decision-makers can understand better the costs related to variation—and make changes that will improve value.

In response to an unmet need for strategic cost accounting guidance, the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) and Strata Decision Technology have launched the L7 Cost Accounting Adoption Model. L7 is healthcare’s first roadmap to help healthcare providers access accurate cost data via the use of advanced cost accounting. Originally designed for 200 leading healthcare delivery systems, the L7 Model is now being open-sourced, making it available at no charge to all healthcare providers.

Attendees to this presentation will learn:

• The challenges of using traditional accounting methods in healthcare.
• The strategic needs that L7 helps healthcare providers meet and how.
• How the L7 supports value-based care.
• How smaller and less well resourced providers can benefit from L7.

Presenter: Steve Lefar, Executive Director, StrataDataScience

How Data Quality Drives Value Across the Healthcare Enterprise

Data quality in healthcare is more important and more challenging to achieve than ever before. Mergers and acquisitions, payment reform, and quality reporting demand more quality data than healthcare organizations are accustomed to providing. It takes a keen understanding of an enterprise’s data and operations to achieve practical and lasting improvements. Improvements in data quality can involve disrupting and redesigning existing workflows to improve data quality and avoid “after the fact” data remediation efforts. Data quality efforts often converge with enterprise data governance initiatives creating added benefits and challenges.

 Learning Objectives:

During this webinar, you’ll learn how improving data quality can drive value across the enterprise by:

• Providing capabilities that address the needs of IT as well as clinical and business people, and help them better collaborate to ensure data is fit for use
• Fitting into the context of larger initiatives like analytics, data governance, regulatory compliance, and master data management
• Aggregating the right data to demonstrate value using business metrics that matter

Speakers: Richard Cramer, Chief Healthcare Strategist, Informatica and Sean McAuley, EDW Manager, Commonwealth Care Alliance

Data Orchestration and Governance

A strong data strategy for payers and providers capitalizes on current technologies to create a health data curation and enrichment hub, in short, a “Data Orchestration Platform.” Aligning resources across all departments to this strategy can enable any provider or health plan to become data-driven while generating an ROI that prepares for a future investment in AI and machine learning.  

Data Orchestration requires connecting numerous internal/external data sources then centrally profiling, enriching and cleansing these data with advanced match, merge and mastering across important domains such as patient, provider attribution, workforce and location. 

Additionally, in healthcare it is important to effectively and centrally manage the 1.2 million codes in all of the clinical terminologies and reference data sets. 

Lastly, these data must be democratized by providing access to definitions and data lineage through governance and also publishing up to date, analyst-friendly self-service data marts and metrics cohorts. 

Learning Objectives:

• Comprehend high-level illustrations of various data complexities specific to the healthcare industry including two actual use case examples of data challenges in acute care.
• Recognize the significance of treating data as an asset to create your Data Orchestration Hub to enable the effective use of Machine Learning, AI, NLP, and IoT as a part of organizational analytics.
• Understand key components of defining analytics ROI and leveraging a Data Orchestration Hub for governance.

Speaker: Shawn Sutherland, CPHIMS, Manager, Patient and Member Outcomes, Information Builders

Shawn’s experience ranges from Director of Analytics at UT Southwestern Medical Center to managing BI, value based clinical quality and EHR software development/reporting teams at Baylor Scott & White Health System. 

He has presented at national HIMSS and HDAA conferences, is an Advisory Board Member for SMU’s Masters in Business Analytics, spent 3 years on the National Quality Task Force, and his work at Baylor was recognized with the national CHIME Innovator of the Year Award.  Shawn brings 20+ years practical experience and an understanding of the latest data technology to help organizations strategically achieve modern, value-based healthcare.