New Financial Analytics App Lets Hospitals Cut Costs While Improving Quality

Health Catalyst's Financial Management Explorer Breaks New Ground Coupling Cost Saving Metrics with Quality Improvement Initiatives

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Health Catalyst

Jun 23, 2014, 08:11 ET

SALT LAKE CITY, June 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- American hospitals, already challenged by low profit margins, are struggling to reduce costs and absorb nearly $155 billion in Medicare cuts imposed by the Affordable Care Act. The law also requires hospitals to improve quality in many areas or face financial penalties. In this environment, hospital finance teams need a way to stay on top of financial performance and quickly identify opportunities to lower costs without affecting the quality of care.

Today's release of Financial Management Explorer from Health Catalyst provides users of the company's Late-Binding™ Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and Analytics Platform a single source of truth for key clinical, operational, and financial measures. The latest example of data analytic innovations from Health Catalyst, the application automates the time-consuming manual process of collecting and combining data from numerous sources to obtain a view of current performance.

Financial Management Explorer also provides significant data visibility and the democratization of critical information. Thanks to its guided navigation and intuitive user interface, managers across the hospital can drill down into clinical processes to uncover cost-reduction opportunities and drivers of variation. Embedded logic quantifies each potential opportunity, making prioritization of improvement targets more straightforward. And flexible reporting views allow for quick drill down into the dimensions of clinical program, payer, provider, and hospital location.

"Most hospitals operate on very slim margins and need a trusted source of updated numbers, trends, and new insights on their performance," said Thomas Burton, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President of Product Development for Health Catalyst. "Our clients have been asking for a solution like Financial Management Explorer to provide those insights and to foster a multi-department learning environment that will help cut costs while improving care across hospitals and clinics. Users can quickly spot where procedures have positive or negative margin as well as to understand the root causes of variation. Financial Management Explorer helps hospitals standardize practice, improve quality and lower costs."

Faster Information, Enhanced Insight
In many organizations, the finance department's monthly or quarterly performance reports are static documents that focus only on "what" is happening rather than "why" it is happening. By contrast, Financial Management Explorer is continuously updated with new information and uses guided navigation to help users quickly identify the causes of variation down to the level of individual providers, cost centers, and activity codes. This strengthens the organization's ability to focus in on strategic opportunities to reduce variability and improve bottom line performance.

Financial Management Explorer quantifies improvement opportunities and captures traditional financial performance measures, including:

Charges
Contribution & Total Margin
Reimbursement
Variable & Total Cost
Length of Stay
Case Mix Index

Financial Explorer is available for users of the Health Catalyst EDW platform, as one of 10 Essential Applications shipped with the EDW. The others are the Executive Dashboard Integration Tool (EDIT), Readmission Explorer, Population Explorer, General Ledger Explorer, Patient Satisfaction Explorer, Patient Flow Explorer, Labor Management Explorer, Cohort Builder, and Key Process Analysis.

Live Demos at ANI 2014
Health Catalyst will demonstrate Financial Management Explorer June 22-25 at the Healthcare Financial Management Association's National Institute conference in Las Vegas. Conference attendees can find out more by visiting Health Catalyst booth #648.

Multi-Media
A product demo of Financial Explorer may be viewed here: www.healthcatalyst.com/financial-management-explorer. Product screenshots and a data sheet are also available.

About Health Catalyst
Health Catalyst is a mission-driven data warehousing and analytics company that helps healthcare organizations of all sizes perform the clinical, financial, and operational reporting and analysis needed for population health and accountable care. Our proven enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and analytics platform helps improve quality, add efficiency and lower costs in support of more than 30 million patients for organizations ranging from the largest US health system to forward-thinking physician practices. Faster and more agile than data warehouses from other industries, the Health Catalyst Late-Binding™ EDW has been heralded by KLAS as a "newer and more effective way to approach EDW." For more information, visit www.healthcatalyst.com, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

For more information contact:
Todd Stein
Amendola Communications for Health Catalyst
916.346.4213
[email protected]

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SOURCE Health Catalyst