Let’s talk about your EHR needs: 1.800.383.6278 MEDHOST Community Login
With revenue margins in hospitals on a steady decline, it's become more critical than ever to track and improve key metrics to ensure operational success.
In this blog, we’ll outline leading practices to monitor hospital performance, improve metrics, and ensure long-term, data-driven success for your facility.
In the healthcare industry, hospitals have been experiencing a steady decline in revenue margins in recent years. In fact, the median operating margin in 2020 was a mere 2.7%, including CARES Act funding.
This trend highlights the critical importance of monitoring, maintaining, and improving hospital performance while keeping costs under control.
Access to affordable business insights is especially valuable for rural, community, and critical access facilities that face data visibility issues due to limited operating budgets and staffing shortages.
Although performance monitoring toolsets may be perceived as a luxury for facilities operating on thin margins, they are, in fact, essential to making informed decisions that can drive profitability.
Starting with an analysis of the bread-and-butter revenue cycle stages is the best approach for facilities working on a budget, as it can immediately reveal problems or successes.
This approach includes tracking essential metrics like denial rate, discharge-not-final-billed encounters, and AR aging. Additional areas of focus should include departments generating revenue and those most impacted by throughput and capacity issues, such as surgical services, emergency, and cath lab.
When choosing an analytics or performance reporting solution, it's crucial to use established standards to avoid any questions on calculations. It's also essential to have a tool that can drill down from high-level metrics to the underlying encounters and provide actionable data.
Establishing baseline metrics at the beginning of any evaluation period allows the hospital to monitor improvement and compare metrics to industry targets and other facilities.
While all this data sounds great, an analytics platform should also be easy to use and learn, requiring minimal training. It should also be cloud and browser-based, enabling easy access to metrics when and where users need them.
Adoption is essential to success. Providing readily available data, data integrity, and a positive user experience is critical to engaging users.
YourCareAnalytics is a powerful business analytics tool for identifying and tracking a hospital’s performance and growth. This platform uses the scale and reliability of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon QuickSight, a cloud-powered business analytics service, to make it easy for users to derive actionable insights quickly.
With industry-standard metrics and drill-down capabilities, YourCareAnalytics compares data within and across facilities and financial classes, helping providers track revenue trends to identify opportunities.
If you want to learn more about how MEDHOST can help you monitor and improve your performance via metrics and analytics, please contact us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
