I’m sure that every time you receive a sales e-mail from an unknown party you ask yourself how that company got your email address. Well, it is a little more complicated than that. These sales organizations have targeted you as an ideal customer for their product or service. It’s called using analytics to data mine to identify their best prospects for their products and services. Guess what – you fit their profile.
Your Healthcare Organization is Doing the Same Thing
It’s safe to say that every hospital in this country is using analytics to determine the contributing factors in their Medicare patients’ readmissions within 30-days. Why? Because they will lose reimbursement if they are an outlier on this Medicare tracked metric. They, too, are looking for a profile.
Supply Analytics Can Identify Your Savings Opportunity Profile
Just like your hospital’s Medicare readmissions within 30-days patient profile, you, too, can and should identify the profile of the products, services, and technologies with metrics beyond acceptable limits. By this we mean that these commodities’ cost per metric are either historically higher than prior months, quarters, or years or are higher than your peers’ benchmarks. This info would fit into your profile of savings opportunities as you begin to look for hidden savings opportunities.
Contributing Factors to Overspending at Hospitals Today
Some of the contributing factors for readmissions within 30-days are: (i) patient doesn’t have a primary physician, (ii) prior hospital admissions, and (iii) low hemoglobin. Using this same thought process, contributing factors to overspending at hospitals today are: (i) changing usage patterns, (ii) vendor upsell, and (iii) staff ignoring policies. Once you understand the contributing factors you can work on eliminating or at least modifying them.
This Sounds Like a Lot of Work that I Don’t Have Time For
By now you might be saying to yourself, “This sounds like a lot of work.” Well, this really isn’t true, since most hospitals are using third party experts for these important cost savings and revenue retention work. All you need to do is feed these organizations your operating statistics and purchasing data. So the next time you get an e-mail from an unknown party, just remember that they are using analytics to make their selling job easier and that you, too, can make your savings job easier with this same power tool.
If you would like a demo of our analytics suite to dramatically increase your savings yield this year, just e-mail us at [email protected].