It’s the season of giving, get-togethers, and good food. A time to reflect on all you’re thankful for and to recall the accomplishments you’re most proud of this year.
It’s also the season of spreadsheets, board meetings, and strategic planning. Fiscal year budget planning is upon us, and it’s time to start setting goals.
If you’re looking to streamline efficiencies, increase net revenue, or improve your overall budget situation in 2019, you’re not alone. Many of our client partners have these same strategic objectives for the new fiscal year and often come to us this time of year looking for guidance on which areas of their health system they should focus to meet these objectives.
Below, I share three main areas your organization can focus on this year to realize a demonstrable return on your investment, and how Nordic can partner with you to make that happen.
1. Revenue Cycle Transformation
By applying a holistic approach to revenue cycle transformation, our team can help you identify, prioritize, and address any tactical issues and weaknesses along your health system’s revenue stream. We’ll first conduct strategic assessments to pinpoint specific revenue lift across your clinical areas, coding, and back-end revenue cycle. Based on the findings from these assessments, our team can partner with you to implement the right changes to address the root causes of these issues.
By implementing this approach, we’ve helped many organizations add between 3 and 4 percent to their annual net revenue. In some instances, we’ve helped client partners assess all major areas of their revenue cycle, adding as much as 7 percent annual net revenue to their bottom line. This can equate to several million dollars, which can be a game-changer for health systems over the course of a budget year.
2. OR Optimization
The perioperative areas, or ORs, are likely the largest revenue generators for your organization, but they may be lagging in terms of EHR functionality, utilization, and adoption. If you’re looking to enhance EHR use in the OR to achieve greater efficiency and profitablity, our team can help.
For system-wide optimization we’ll start by conducting comprehensive assessments. That way, if you’re experiencing challenges with managing materials, preference cards, or anesthesiologist time out of the OR, for example, the assessments will inform a succinct action plan. These assessments also cover both your EHR and ERP systems, helping you identify strong opportunities for revenue lift with this critical piece of integration.
As a final step, our team will craft a detailed report including current-state analysis, ROI estimates, and implementation recommendations tailored to your organization. From there, you’ll have the information you need to make sweeping improvements to workflows, tools, and processes – efficiencies that will help your organization demonstrate ROI, such as reduced OR turnover times or measurable decreased supply waste.
3. Provider Efficiency Improvement
Provider satisfaction and efficiency is an extremely important measure of success. Each year, healthcare organizations lose millions of dollars to physician burnout and dissatisfaction. Many of these physicians cite that they have too many bureaucratic tasks, are overworked, and face increasing pressure to master the EHR.
If physician happiness is a top priority for your organization, we can help you leverage Epic’s PEP data to inform your physician training, governance, and EHR optimization strategy. Using your PEP data set, our team can build a robust dashboard with the help of data visualization tools such as Qlik, Tableau, or PowerBI. This data can help you tailor your at-the-elbow training programs to specifically meet the needs of your physicians. Your trainers and clinic managers can use this custom dashboard to have more valuable interactions with your providers and help them improve their use of the EHR system.
Learn more about how we can partner with your organization to realize demonstrable ROI in these three areas. We’d love to make your budget-planning season a little brighter this year.
Happy Holidays!
Aaron Mann serves as director of business development. Prior to joining Nordic, he worked on the client team for Novu, a Minneapolis-based startup with a focus on consumer engagement for health plans. He spent seven years at Epic working on the HIM team and was a part of Epic's first international implementation in the Netherlands. During his time at Epic, he also worked closely with HR to help craft processes and best practices for Implementation Services hiring.