by Brent Girardeau
Depending on your perspective, we are either “emerging from” or “still in the midst” of a global pandemic. All markets have been impacted in some form or fashion, but, arguably, healthcare will see the most transformation. Not only are the impacts financial through loss of revenue and changes to reimbursement structure among others, but also throughout all aspects of care delivery and patient outreach.
We’ve seen appointments change to reduce face to face visits and take advantage of telehealth. There have been physical transformations to public areas with respect to patient and caregiver contact in both ambulatory and acute settings in respect to social distancing. The protocols for sanitation of facilities, and requirements for sterilization of every surface have evolved. These are only a few examples of thousands of changes that are occurring. But what are the impacts?
Unfortunately, many organizations won’t know that answer for months or even years. If you don’t know how you will be impacted, how you will quantify the efficacy of your organization’s reaction or aren’t able to predict the outcome within a standard deviation, now is the perfect time to review your data strategy. Undoubtedly, this will not be the last major event requiring organizations to possess the agility to pivot, and data is the most critical tool organizations already possess, yet few have the ability to truly engage data quickly enough to transform strategy.
Reason #1: Culture, Why Now?
Honestly, why not now? Normalcy has changed, the way of doing business has changed. Your organization is already immersed in change and like it or not, team members are in a much more agile mindset. Use this opportunity to engage, empathize, and seek input to evaluate how things are going and how they can be done better. Pivot and Strategize.
- What does your data tell you about your team member satisfaction, and, more importantly, do you trust it?
- What other pieces of data support this story?
- Have physician’s patient volumes increased and has that resulted in an impact to the quality of care?
- Has revenue been impacted?
These are obvious questions to ask, and it is important to understand and react to them. However, if that’s where you stop, a massive opportunity has been missed to predict and prepare for the next challenge and build a mitigation strategy. More so, an opportunity to understand what data points are important and correlated to team satisfaction and at what thresholds are these triggered.
- What data trends and correlates to physician satisfaction? When should alerting be triggered under normal operations to alert leadership that satisfaction may begin to be a problem and anticipate attrition costs and issues?
- Similarly, what data trends and correlates to care quality and patient outcomes? How can your organization anticipate a downturn in outcome measurement, and enact a plan before it impacts reimbursement?
Take advantage of your team’s mindset, use it to engage, empower, and build a better way. Consequently, your team member satisfaction will rise, the connection between leadership and team members will strengthen, and leadership could gain a perspective critical for future mitigation planning.
Reason #2: Risk
How is risk measured across your organization? Are those methods and the data still valid? If you don’t know the answers with a high level of certainty, then risk review is in order. It’s imperative that organizations are unified in the understanding of critical risks, what makes these specific risks critical, and how they are measured. Healthcare has certainly evolved over the past decade, although arguably, the underlying constructs supporting care delivery, revenue, and expenses still remain largely similar. Even with the shift from fee for service to quality, the same underlying mechanics are intact.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the risks are the same, and it absolutely does not mean that the methods for identifying and reacting to risks do not need attention. Many organizations are comfortable trusting historic experience and reactions and perhaps piecing together small subsets of data. However, when was the last time an effort was made to compile a historical inventory of impactful events, detailing the reaction strategy that was deployed, and then looking at all available data to determine which strategies were most successful and why? A better question may be: “Could you even consolidate all of the meaningful data to perform this exercise?”
A few questions that all healthcare delivery organizations must be able to answer with specific pertinence today include:
- What were the revenue and expense impacts of COVID-19 to your balance sheet(s)?
- What strategies are you undertaking to recoup lost revenue?
- How much revenue will you be able to recoup with each strategy?
- Is there additional expense anticipated to support these strategies?
- What is the permanence of these solutions and how are you quantifying the impact?
- What is the plan, cost, and impact if there is another pandemic, and what data supports that plan?
Risks exist in every part of the healthcare delivery machine, whether it is patient safety and care quality, financial profitability, business development, technology resiliency, etc. The list is extensive. Regardless of the area of risk that is most important to your leadership team, the only way to have confidence that this can be reported consistently and dependably is to be sure you have a trustworthy data set in place. To truly have and convey confidence in the dependability of a data set, it’s imperative that there is a strategy and governance dictating how it is managed.
Reason #3: Consumerism
Healthcare is in the midst of a major transformation of embracing consumerism. With many markets at the edge of their geographic reach, along with the transition from fee for service reimbursement, it has become critical to find other methods to retain and protect revenue. One major way this is occurring is through the adoption of a consumerism strategy. Traditional healthcare organizations are beginning to expand their view of customers as patients to that of consumers. This involves not only accepting the self-service, tailored, and personal approach every interaction with a possible customer, but also providing and managing consumer data access among a much more diverse audience within the organization.
This certainly presents challenges, however, with a consumer market that relies on search engine recommendations for choices in care provision, its critical to consume and manage consumer data that may not traditionally be clinically applicable. This information is critical in solidification of customer relationships, loyalty, and brand awareness. In addition to consumption and management of this data in a way that is historically less pertinent to the caregiving setting, the underlying value it builds through a relationship and satisfaction measurement when the caregiver demonstrates awareness to personalize an interaction is immense.
Consider, when seeking medical care in a new location or for a new service, are you more likely to call your insurance company, drive to the closest location, or reach out to an acquaintance for their recommendation? A trusted recommendation will always be the highest predictor of outcome, so it is immensely valuable for caregivers to have the data enabling personal interactions driving satisfaction.
While all organizations analyze data from a financial margin perspective, it’s more complex to determine ROI on consumerism investments. Some examples to demonstrate the point:
- What is the cost to procure an app supporting a patient acquisition strategy targeted towards women’s health?
- What is the ROI and break even for this when viewed as an investment, as opposed to simply an expense?
- ROI after 5 years of standard wellness services?
- ROI after 10 years assuming patient was acquired and has two children being delivered and pediatric care provisioned in the same network?
- What data (from which organizational verticals) is required to support this strategy operationally and financially?
- What access and visibility to this data is needed for clinical departments and those involved with standard business functions?
- Does the call center, billing, collection team create the same experience when on the phone with patients?
For the organization to truly support the evolving demands of the consumer, the importance of having a solid data strategy cannot be understated.
There are a hundred more reasons I could give you, but, today at least, these are three of the top ones. Stay tuned for more from me and feel free to email me at brent.girardeau@divurgent.com.
