The pursuit of financial performance excellence

Health providers face an unprecedented number of forces that threaten their financial health.

These forces include, among other factors, a reduction in fee-for-service revenue because of the shift to value-based care, government payment rate reductions, depressed volumes due to changing consumer preference patterns for virtual care, an imbalance in talent supply versus demand driving up wage rates and costs associated with the digital and consumer transformation of the operating model.

These challenges will require health providers to have increased insight into the drivers of their financial performance and to have a sustainable focus on financial performance excellence.

The critical considerations

Long range financial plan guides the level of financial performance improvement needed to sustain financial excellence.

Understanding where health providers create their margins will be critical to elevating financial performance.

Health providers will need to increase their focus on improving core business processes, using process flow analysis to identify improvement opportunities within and across departments—breaking down the silos.

Focused “workshops” utilizing techniques deployed in other sectors will enhance efficiency.

Data analytics need to be developed in support of identifying financial improvement opportunities – can provide insight into opportunities such as matching supply against demand, predicting demand, understanding referral patterns, care management and clinical variation improvement, efficiency and access issues.

Strong financial performance must be rewarded and recognized.