The Chartis Group Report Helps Hospitals Improve Financial Performance While Preparing for the Future Accountable Care Environment

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Aug 04, 2010, 06:00 ET

CHICAGO, Aug. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Today's economic conditions have changed the market landscape and shifted the financial outlook of virtually every healthcare provider. Effective cost management is unquestionably becoming more critical for hospitals as the provisions of health care reform are enacted along with ongoing pressures of payer mix changes, decreased access to capital, and patient access challenges. In an effort to help hospitals and health systems nationwide cope with these market pressures, The Chartis Group, a leading healthcare management consulting firm, has published its latest whitepaper entitled "Improving Performance and Building Capabilities During Turbulent Times." This report defines specific actions for healthcare provider organizations to take to improve their cost position while simultaneously preparing for success in the future healthcare environment.

In this latest report, The Chartis Group, whose clients include 17 of the top 20 hospitals in the US, present a Market Evolution Framework that highlights the importance of cost management for hospitals and health systems, and emphasizes three other key initiatives that must be addressed: care management, network management, and population health management.

"While much has been written about the need to bend the cost curve in healthcare, our paper illustrates how cost management alone will not be sufficient for most providers in the long run," according to Ethan Arnold, Managing Director and Advanced Operations Practice Leader at The Chartis Group. "We think that hospitals and health systems will experience the most sustainable performance improvement results by combining their cost management efforts with strategic initiatives that also prepare them for the future post-reform healthcare environment."

The whitepaper describes how providers in different local markets may be affected at different rates by the various impending market pressures. It recommends that hospitals and health systems prioritize and carefully sequence their focus on all four management areas in order to successfully operate in a future environment that places a greater degree of financial risk on providers and pushes them to organize and effectively function within an accountable care environment.

According to the report, the four strategic and operational initiatives that healthcare leaders should undertake for successful operations management now and in the future include:

Cost management: Providers must reduce unit costs through process innovation, reduced variation, and efforts to leverage scale and rationalize capacity.
Care management: Providers must manage utilization and improve efficiency by reducing clinical variation, building innovative and lower cost multi-disciplinary care delivery models, and implementing new health management protocols.
Network management: Providers must align and coordinate patient throughput across sites of care while ensuring access to the most appropriate settings to optimize outcomes and overall health of a defined population.
Population health management: Providers must expand their ability to manage defined populations across the continuum of care by developing medical homes, deploying electronic medical records and other advanced technology enablers and data aggregation tools, and implementing more sophisticated risk management capabilities.

"We believe that these four strategic and operational imperatives, when prioritized appropriately and in accordance with the predominant reimbursement mechanism and local market conditions, will help providers optimize current performance while simultaneously preparing for the future accountable care environment," states George Sauter, Director and Advanced Operations Practice Leader at The Chartis Group.

The full report can be downloaded from the Insights page of The Chartis Group's website at www.chartis.com, where additional information about the firm and the services it provides can also be found.

About The Chartis Group

The Chartis Group is an advisory services firm that provides management consulting and applied research to leading healthcare organizations. The firm is comprised of uniquely experienced senior healthcare professionals and consultants who apply a distinctive knowledge of healthcare economics, markets, and organizational dynamics to help clients achieve unequaled results. The Chartis Group has offices in Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco. For more information, visit www.chartis.com.

SOURCE The Chartis Group