Healthcare Dashboards & KPIs: Tips and Tricks for Practice Success

Healthcare organizations are buried in data–patient data, claims data, financial data, operational data and more–and that includes finance leaders, the finance team, and the c-suite. But just how much of all this data is being organized and leveraged for practice success?

Respondents to our recent Healthcare Finance Team Leadership Survey told us that manual, time consuming reporting and a lack of real-time visibility into key metrics and performance were the biggest internal frustrations their organizations are facing today. Further, our respondents are overwhelmingly looking for automation when it comes to reporting – to enable turnkey, on-demand, self-service reporting so they can free up the finance team to spend more of their time on strategic work.

What to Measure and How to Measure It

There’s clearly a need for data, so the question becomes: What do you measure? How? And what do you do with the insight? To answer these questions (and more), I sat down with Linda Pinion, Sage Intacct’s Principal Solutions Consultant (and resident expert on all things KPIs, dashboards and reports) to uncover tips and tricks for healthcare finance leaders looking to take measurement and reporting to the next level for practice success and how financial and accounting reporting for healthcare organizations can help with that.

Focus on a few key areas for the most impact

Linda urges healthcare finance leaders to go beyond traditional revenue and expenses when thinking about measurement. Dig into the details!

• Consider comparing supplies versus equipment, or direct versus indirect expenses.
• Compare provider performance or location against location, revenue by insurer, or the profitability of certain treatments or services over others.
• Challenge yourself and your team to look beyond the “standard” financials and explore how things like capital improvements, revenue and expenses related to patient care and procedures, participating in new payment models or offering new products and services, will impact the bottom line.

Sage Intacct customer Paige Oldham, CFO of Health Solutions did just this, and now enjoys more visibility and streamlined efficiencies, telling us,

We can combine different kinds of KPIs all in one report for a much clearer picture of what’s going on with the business. I have [everything] all in one place and can drill-down as needed, which helps immensely.

The lesson learned? You won’t know until you measure.

Written by Melissa O’Dowd, Sage Healthcare Practice

Melissa is a leader within the Healthcare practice at Sage Intacct, having spent the last 18 years working within the healthcare industry helping healthcare technology, consumer health, medical devices and diagnostics, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies change the lives of the patients they serve.