Service Line Optimization

The Situation

Often times, healthcare executives lack the ability to monitor physician referral patterns and trend detailed system utilization over time from both provider-based physicians and independent practices. Inability to visualize this information and understand its full effect can have a negative impact on your hospital’s bottom line as referral business declines, margins deteriorate, and potential growth opportunities fail to materialize. Without detailed analysis of service line utilization, down to the specific physician and charge level, executives and department managers will not have an accurate picture of exactly where or how service line volumes can be increased to optimal levels.

A sample solution shows the volume trend for the electrophysiology lab over time, highlighting the fact that current volume is down to half of the average volume.

What is Needed Now?

Hospital executives must be able to identify areas of improvement and target specific services to maximize growth opportunities and fix service level issues quickly. This level of detail requires smart analytical applications that aggregate data from across the system. Service line managers should be armed with timely, accurate and meaningful information on specific utilization trends to maximize growth opportunities and ensure immediate response when referral volumes begin to decline. Service line managers should be aware of exact physicians and services with the most opportunity for growth. Sophisticated analytic horsepower needs to be harnessed to not only see what is happening in the system, but also to identify what volumes are missing that should be occurring. And most importantly, this type of detailed knowledge will allow for targeted improvement plans to ensure optimal physician and patient satisfaction of hospital services and continued growth over time.

The WhiteCloud Solution

The WhiteCloud Service Line Optimization solutions automate the process of analyzing referral business and service line volumes in order to track and assess physician practice patterns, and more importantly, understand where business is missing. Visibility to physician referral patterns arms department managers, physician service teams, and executives with the knowledge and insight they need to identify issues that are impacting volumes and to enhance service line growth. Based on the WhiteCloud Performance Analytics™ methodology, our solutions integrate data from various operational systems and combine needed information to provide visibility to root causes and drivers of sliding volumes. In addition, services with potential patient or physician satisfaction issues are highlighted.

Our solutions generate department-specific productivity and referral volume dashboards that enable service line managers to drive growth with a targeted approach and to immediately investigate potential issues as evidenced by sliding utilization patterns or deteriorating payer mix shifts in their volumes. Specifically, our approach alleviates labor intensive, tedious and error-prone reporting processes, and empowers service line managers to do meaningful analysis of departmental operations in seconds, not days. Decision makers are no longer required to call an analyst for the information they need to effectively manage their areas of responsibility. The WhiteCloud solutions enable targeted management initiatives and service line growth strategies through continual monitoring of referral traffic, identification of referral leakage and utilization of hospital services. This results in sustained volume increases and overall improvements in service line performance and satisfaction with hospital services.

The Result: Increased Patient and Physician Satisfaction and a Healthier Bottom Line

Service line managers will have the ability to target growth opportunities by understanding which providers and services have not sustained their projected growth for the fiscal year, and will be equipped with the information they need to identify potential areas where they can increase physician satisfaction with services. Improved utilization of services will maximize bottom line targets and ensure that services are achieving the level of patient and physician satisfaction required to sustain and grow volumes over time.

• Executive and department-level dashboards provide hospital executives with the ability to immediately spot where service lines are losing business and where to target growth efforts.
• Service line managers are able to identify decreased referrals from physicians before it’s too late to take corrective action.
• Hospital executives and service line managers have the ability to monitor service line volumes and growth, over time, on an ongoing basis.