Enhancing Transparency Around Service Line Performance

Axiom EPM customer, LifePoint Hospitals, was recently featured in the August issue of HFMA's Cost Containment newsletter. An excerpt of the article "Enhancing Transparency Around Service Line Performance" is below.

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By Lauren Phillips, HFMA

In 2011, Nashville, Tenn.-based LifePoint Hospitals had some important questions about its future: Which service lines should it grow? And where in the health system were there opportunities for operational changes that could drive hard-dollar savings?

LifePoint had difficulty answering these questions because it lacked accurate, reliable, patient-level cost and profitability analytics. To solve this problem, LifePoint leaders decided to revamp the cost-accounting process for its service lines to improve the accuracy and accessibility of performance reporting—and fuel better business decisions.

LifePoint identified four specific goals: Implement the new cost-accounting system across all hospitals. Streamline data reconciliation and validation tasks. Improve executive reporting with more timely and comprehensive views of service line trends. Shift the focus away from auditing tasks toward more strategic analysis.

At the time, “Our existing reports raised more questions than they answered,” says LifePoint’s Chad Porter, director of enterprise data management and strategy. “We were spending three to four weeks reconciling every month. We wanted more efficiency and also more insight and analysis. We wanted the data to tell the story.”

Read the rest of the story here.