Aligning Institutional Research Investment with Clinical Strategy: A Future-Focused Approach

ECG recently sat down with a number of leaders from cancer centers to discuss the core issues that oncology programs are facing. This article shares key learnings from our conversations as well as our insights regarding the future of the business of oncology and how your organization can proactively prepare.

While there are many perspectives and publications on the “Hospital of the Future,” few, if any, provide a system perspective. Too often, when imagining the "Health System of the Future," a hospital-centric model emerges. The challenge in this hospital-centric view is that it ignores most of the factors that are already driving services, activity, and revenue to new and different care environments, and will do so increasingly over the next decade.

To be successful under value-based payment, a health system requires collaborative and binding relationships with affiliated physicians; the professional service agreements the organizations enters with the physicians should be designed to firmly establish such relationships.

For many health systems, referral leakage may equate to millions of dollars in forgone revenue, as every patient who seeks care elsewhere is a lost revenue opportunity now and potentially into the future. Learn the symptoms of an underperforming referral management system.

In 2017, SEARHC joined the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, and other local Tribal health partners in implementing a shared Cerner electronic health record (EHR) system to improve communication between the organizations serving Alaska’s Native population and to enhance the quality of care provided.

With shrinking clinical margins, AMCs are increasingly focused on ensuring institutional expenses and investments are tightly aligned with the organization’s clinical strategy. For AMCs to strategically manage their institutional investments, they must first understand the full extent of their expenditures, especially with regards to research.

In the second post in a two-part discussion series, look more closely at how service lines and employed medical groups should work together to achieve the goals of the overall health system and be jointly accountable for world-class, patient-centered outcomes.

In the first of two discussions originally published by Becker's Hospital Review, Jessica Turgon, Principal and co-leader of the Operations Improvement and Technology Division at ECG Management Consultants, and Whitney Haller, Senior Manager at ECG and subject matter expert in service line strategy and operations, delve into the ways that service lines and employed medical groups can live symbiotically within an organizational ecosystem.

Tying a change management process to your EHR project is integral to the project’s long-term success. It will ease the transition for physicians, staff, and the organization as a whole.