Operational Technology as a Catalyst for Growth

Health Systems are under tremendous pressure to manage costs while also finding ways to grow patient volumes; it’s the “do more with less” dilemma that, according to Bloomberg, has seen more than half of all hospitals in the U.S. operate at a loss over the past few years.

As I’ve traveled across the country meeting with leaders from large and small hospitals and health systems alike, one common theme has never failed to surface. Every hospital in the country is looking for ways to expand, grow, and find additional revenue streams. This desire for growth keeps many hospital executives up at night, and I have seen it manifest in three key areas.

• Acquisition – 2023 continued what has been the fastest pace of hospital mergers in history with more than 150 systems coming to some sort of partnership agreement since 2021 and we don’t see a slowing in this trend in 2024.
• Expansion at the end points – More than half of all revenue now comes from outpatient care, outpacing revenue from inpatient care even with the acquisition of more hospitals into the larger health systems.
• An emphasis on patient engagement and retention — Prioritizing patient engagement and retention has lasting benefits for health systems, including improved patient outcomes, enhanced satisfaction scores, reduced patient attrition, and an overall cost savings. The resulting increase in patient volumes can also lead to opportunities for innovation and expansion, including additional sources of revenue, and better positioning for value-based contracts.

The first of those tactics, acquisition, is arguably the most challenging and costly. In order to achieve sustainable revenue growth, health systems must expand their reach beyond the four walls of the hospital. This can be accomplished by developing stronger connections with referring affiliates, simplifying the process for inbound and outbound transfer partners, and connecting emerging care settings to create a smoother patient journey throughout the entire healthcare ecosystem.

Managing large, multidimensional health systems in today’s economic environment is complex. It requires system-wide visibility of capacity, centralized placement, and predictive demand visualization. While EMRs are vital for billing and clinical documentation, they aren’t designed for growth and fall flat when trying to connect to affiliated and partner facilities such as post-acute care providers, which are integral in ensuring smooth transitions in patient flow.

Enter the purpose-built operational platform. This technology complements the EMR to fully integrate workflows to improve capacity by reducing operational bottlenecks and predicting demand over time. Centralizing access to operational data creates shared situational awareness across the enterprise, driving strategic growth through greater transfer and referral acceptance, connecting disconnected care settings, ensuring patients are placed in the most appropriate care setting, and helping to better understand exactly where new patients come from and where they’re going when they depart.

Having this operational layer on top of the EMR enables:

• Proactive capacity planning spanning every facility in the enterprise.
• Streamlined patient inflow from all referrers to improve the quality & quantity of patients.
• Eliminating manual processes and automating acceptance will facilitate faster, easier coordination of transfers to post-acute, rehabilitation, and behavioral health care.
• Connecting traditionally disconnected care settings in the ambulatory, acute, and post-acute setting regardless of owned, affiliated, or unaffiliated status.

As we move beyond the health system to true market networks that link not just owned and affiliated providers but all community partners, the need for visibility and data to scale across disparate health information systems, especially EMRs, is paramount. Organizations need advanced technology to make it possible to analyze large volumes of patient data, identify trends in patient movement, and influence patient flow preferences to develop new market growth strategies that keep patients closer to home, reducing leakage, and supporting the organic growth necessary to boost revenue.

Many healthcare executives I’ve spoken with struggle with the need to grow without adding additional beds, even while operating at near full capacity. They want to attract more patients, treat them safely and efficiently, and move them quickly to the next phase of care so they can bring in the next patient. One leader recently shared a quote with me that sums up these daily struggle:

Anything that allows us to use our physical capacity and people capacity to its utmost potential and even add more than what we have receives high prioritization from me because it’s too expensive to continue to keep building physical things.

Healthcare Leader

Isn’t that the truth!!