How to make effective financial decisions with real-time data analytics

How do you help healthcare organizations navigate their biggest challenges?

Hospitals and health systems face increasingly complex demands on their financial departments. New market requirements are forcing healthcare entities to analyze more data than ever. Robust information can help organizations successfully anticipate and respond to complicated business dynamics, including bundled payments, accountable care organizations, value-based care, population health, rising labor costs and integration across product lines.

The challenge of delivering quality healthcare while making wise business decisions requires powerful tools, and EPSi is the choice of top health systems around the country. EPSi has the industry’s largest install base of financial decision support and budgeting solutions for hospitals and health systems. Using our tools, organizations can face evolving business challenges with confidence.

EPSi changed the landscape of healthcare financial analytics when it launched its first solution in 1999. Since then, hundreds of health systems have saved or recovered tens of millions of dollars by using our tools.

What advice would you offer to healthcare leaders when choosing among vendors?

Business purchasers are asked to make significant investments in tools and applications that carry enormous risk, and they often have to do this with limited information prior to making a purchasing decision. It takes time to set up frameworks, rubrics and timelines, and doing so often fails to answer critical questions. Make sure any financial decision support vendors are set up to build their answers around solutions, not modules. Look for comprehensive offerings built on modern technology that provide real-time and predictive analytics because examining retrospective data isn’t enough anymore. Seek out vendors that invest in technology and people and continuously innovate. Ask yourself, “Is this vendor a long-term partner or a long-winded promiser?”

Here are some more specific factors to look for:

• Pricing – Fixed but flexible pricing, not a bank of hours with no accountability
• Framework –The what and how of a project or application
• Timeline – Measured, not rushed
• Elasticity of approach – Flexible, not rigid
• Resource experience – Aligned by solutions, not by modules
• Analytics – Enabling, not restrictive
• Advisory support – Real-world experience
• Ongoing training – Extensive, not restrictive
• Product vision – Transformational, not incremental
• Future scalability – Ready to launch (true cloud, not just hosted, local or remote hosted)

What is some advice you can give providers for a successful implementation of a new product or service?

Plan ahead. Dedicate technical and human resources to the implementation. Your vendor should guide you through a thorough discovery and design session that includes assessment as well as data planning. Be sure your vendor has dedicated, skilled resources that can provide guidance on acquiring data, designing the right costing approaches and preparing for advanced clinical and cost-management techniques. After implementation, your team should truly own a system that drives operational strategies. 

Quick Facts

• Number of years on the Short List: 10 years
• 95% of participants “agree” or “strongly agree” that they would recommend EPSi solutions to colleagues

About EPSi

EPSi is the industry leader in integrated healthcare decision analytics, budgeting and planning solutions. It leads the way in cost containment transformation with its innovative RealCost cloud-based solutions built on AWS. More than 1,015 installed hospitals in the U.S., including nine of the top-10-rated hospitals, 128 IDN systems, and 40 global academic facilities and international healthcare systems, rely on EPSi for data-driven insight into managing costs and improving long-range financial performance. Learn more about EPSi at www.epsi.io.

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