Why Healthcare Reporting?
Managed services is not a one-size-fits-all solution for resourcing challenges in the healthcare world, but there are areas where working with a strategic partner can help solve specific, tactical issues – and provide unexpected benefits beyond the scope of the original agreement.
Managed services works best when a healthcare system has large volumes of routine tasks that are require reasonably similar expertise and tools. Healthcare reporting is a great example as data volumes, and therefore requests for data, are constantly increasing and fulfilling these volumes requires a team of strong technical resources.
What makes healthcare reporting teams unique from other IT teams is the broad subject matter expertise required to address requests from across the enterprise – clinical, financial, access, quality and more. On top of being exceptional from a technical perspective, reporting team members need to take a consultative approach to their work because data requests are often highly customized and require significant end user interaction and scoping.
Resources with this mix of skills and experience are scarce and that scarcity makes it very difficult to recruit, train and retain top talent. Many health systems’ HR departments are not able to compete with salaries and benefits offered and find themselves in a hamster wheel of recruitment and training. As a result, reporting staff tends to be undertrained, under skilled and cannot keep up with increased demand or with the complex nature of the work.
For these reasons, healthcare reporting tends to be the perfect space to explore a managed services staffing model.
Success Story
A health system in Louisiana experienced a high volume and velocity of incoming work that led to a huge backlog of report requests. Staff spent most of their time digging out from under a pile of on mundane maintenance tasks. Their solution was to find a cost-effective resourcing approach that would serve as an extension of their team.
Pivot Point Consulting’s Managed Reporting service was able to provide immediate value given their deep understanding of the Epic EHR, as well as the data model that sits beneath it. Our team was deployed to work through the organization’s backlog and free up their internal team to focus on the high-value strategic projects.
The Unexpected Benefits
The primary goal of managed reporting is to take the day-to-day work off of an internal team’s plate, but we’ve seen repeatedly 3 unexpected benefits of working with a managed reporting team including:
‘Up-level’ Your Team: Because a managed reporting team is able to bring a high level of expertise that transcends geography and is available full time, we pair our folks with the organization’s team to serve as direct mentors to those who might be struggling professionally or technically.We view what we bring to the table as the player/coach mentality, which enables the work to get done, but it also contributes to the longer-term development of an organization’s core staff. Many clients tend to end up in a climate of attrition, so anything they can do to support or retain staff, they are willing to explore. Examples of the player/coach model in action include peer code review to optimize resource usage and office hours for drop-in questions. Up-leveling has been the biggest unexpected benefit to many organizations. The goal is to remove the burden, not the employees. A managed reporting solution enables FTE employees to focus on the important work they were hired to do.
Resourcing Flexibility: Healthcare systems facing attrition and lack of available reporting and analytics resources have difficulty properly staffing these roles. As projects evolve, resource needs also can change. Training existing employees on a new technology or methodology can take a lot of time many overburdened IT departments simply do not have. A managed reporting model brings the ability to flex knowledge, skills and abilities dynamically as projects shift. Take data warehousing for example. First, organizations need a data architect. After the build, they need an analyst. Managed services can make that transition seamless, which cannot be done in a traditional FTE resourcing model. The key difference is a managed reporting model is able to be nimble as needs change from day-to-day and are able to anticipate needed skills before an issue arises.
Soft Cost Savings: It is important when considering a managed reporting model to remember the soft cost savings that transcend the cost of the actual managed reporting work. For example, let’s look at the cost of the day-to-day management of people. Our managed reporting team places experienced resources on an organization’s team, thus eliminating the time and effort needed for recruiting. We also take care of onboarding and remove mundane managerial tasks such as the procurement of the new hire’s laptop, setting up their access, etc. This generates soft cost savings as well as significant time savings for the management team.
While the goal of managed healthcare reporting is to be to a lower-cost option than general staff augmentation and take significant day-to-day work off the organization’s plate, the unexpected benefits of up-leveling staff skills, resourcing flexibility and soft casot savings can yield untapped, exponential value too.
Want to free yourself up to focus on strategy? Contact our managed services experts.
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Zack Tisch, Vice President, Strategic Growth, is a dynamic healthcare IT executive leader with 15 years’ experience in leading complex, integrated healthcare information technology projects at some of the nation’s leading healthcare institutions, such as Cedars-Sinai, MD Anderson Cancer Center, UCLA Health and Stanford Heath Care. He is passionate about maximizing value out of the EHR systems to provide efficient, effective patient care.
In his role leading Strategic Growth for clients, Zack focuses on architecting high value solutions to enable client growth as well as process and resource optimization. Zack is a former Epic employee and is certified in 15 Epic applications. He is also a PMP. Zack received his BA from Duke University and has completed Executive MBA Coursework at UCLA and the University of Texas.
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