Owensboro Health’s financial team won a national award from Strata, a cloud-based financial planning, analytics and performance platform in healthcare.
Strata announced Owensboro Health as one of two winners of the 2019 Strata Decision LEAP (Lead, Excel, Achieve, and Progress) Award. This recognizes healthcare organizations for outstanding performance in the areas of finance and strategy to benefit both their organization and the communities they serve.
Owensboro Health, serves 14 counties in Kentucky and Indiana. The system includes two hospitals, a 200-provider medical group, as well as numerous outpatient facilities and a cancer center.
A Strata customer for 10 years, Owensboro Health is the first health system in the nation to achieve Level 7 on the HFMA-Strata L7™ Cost Accounting Adoption Model, which provides a framework for helping hospitals and healthcare systems assess their current cost accounting methodology, understand the level of accuracy of their cost data, and benchmark capabilities against peers.
Owensboro Health was recognized for their work improving the accuracy of cost accounting, strengthening payer negotiations and pricing and reducing the cost of care delivery.
The nonprofit health system was saved $450,000 per year by using decision support to identify an IV catheter that was exponentially more expensive but no more effective than a cheaper brand. Owensboro Health was also recognized ofr using what-if analysis for lesser-of clauses to identify charge increase opportunities of $1 million a year and for preventing a potential $12 million net loss through more accurate analysis of a payer’s proposed risk-based contract.
“With the help of Strata, Owensboro Health has been able to move from a position of having interesting facts to having actionable data,” said John Hackbarth, System Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Owensboro Health. “We finally have data at a discreet level to show the comparative resource consumption profiles by providers. Additionally, we are able to identify costing of items compared to national median data to sharpen our focus on annual use levels by provider, payer, and service line. And we can now evaluate proposed changes to managed care contracts against the actual utilization rate for preceding periods and know the impact on net revenue before we agree to any contract adjustments. Most importantly, we can now depend on the data so when a provider questions the results, we have the ability to drill down and prove the numbers.”
