Innovative Healthcare Partnerships: Making the Most of Merging Resources and Capabilities

Healthcare mergers and acquisitions performed solidly in 2020, despite the downturn in the U.S. economy and healthcare in general. Organizations responded to new challenges by partnering with each other to build core business strengths, address gaps in care delivery the pandemic exposed, and enhance their resources to navigate current and future crises. Realizing the potential of emerging healthcare partnerships requires an open and scalable analytics infrastructure plus a cultural and contractual openness to allow innovation to flourish. Organizations that have adopted an open analytics platform have the data operating advantage to form partnerships, efficiently and smoothly bring best-of-breed solutions to market, and enable the innovative potential of collaborations.

Hiring Top Healthcare Analytics Talent: Five Best Practices

COVID-19 has escalated healthcare’s decision-making demands, reinforcing the industry’s need for highly skilled analytics team members. As a result, health systems face mounting pressure to hire the best-suited analytics talent in a timely manner and with minimal burden on existing team members. Five proven inclusive strategies will help hiring managers efficiently build an analytics team that can adapt to healthcare’s shifting environment and also fit within an organization’s culture:

1. Open positions to remote employees and conduct interviews via video conferencing.
2. Insert “tollgates” into the hiring process.
3. Use scenario-based role play to assess many competencies concurrently.
4. Assess cultural fit.
5. Follow up with and provide feedback to all candidates.

Employee Engagement During COVID-19: Using Culture to Manage Stress, Maintain Productivity

As organizations confront a post-COVID-19 world, leaders must balance pandemic-driven practices and environments with team member eagerness to and uncertainty towards returning to business as usual. Even though ongoing fear and stress are inevitable, leaders and managers can use a positive workplace culture to support employees, engage their teams, and foster productivity. Safe, reliable access to health and wellness, remote mental health resources, and consistent communications will help organizations establish and maintain a positive culture that remains a steadfast source of support as the healthcare industry navigates the next phases of COVID-19.

Implicit Bias Training Helps Eliminate Healthcare Disparities

From hospitals and clinics to data warehousing companies, overcoming implicit biases with the help of up-to-date data can improve patient care and team member equity. Allina Health and Health Catalyst used data to discover that implicit biases existed within their companies. At Allina Health, these implicit biases proved to be a barrier to patient care. They negatively impacted patient access to important resources like hospice care. At Health Catalyst, the leadership team realized there was a lack of women in leadership positions and a general lack of diversity in the technology sector. Leadership teams at both organizations invested in creating implicit bias trainings to equip team members with tools to overcome their biases.

Beginning the Conversation: Health Equity

Equity impacts the fabric of society down to the type and quality of healthcare different racial and ethnic patient populations receive. COVID-19 has underscored disparities in healthcare delivery in the United States, as the pandemic has disproportionately affected the nation’s black communities. To care for and recognize the value of all individuals, healthcare must leverage data and analytics to better understand patient populations by race and ethnicity and determine how to meet the needs of its underserved populations.

Remote Healthcare Work: Best Practices amid COVID-19

With no known end to the COVID-19 social distancing directives, many healthcare organizations are shifting some team members to remote work arrangements. Clinicians offering telehealth services, case managers, as well as administrative, financial, and IT teams and others contributing away from the frontlines of care are candidates to work from home while continuing to support their organization’s operations. Though a shift in normal processes, research has shown that remote workers can be as or more productive as they are in the office setting and often report high levels of job satisfaction. Following best practices for remote-first work will help team members, managers, and organizations transition to and thrive in a distributed setting.

COVID-19 Healthcare Cybersecurity: Best Practices for a Remote Workforce

Social distancing, effective hand-washing techniques, sneezing into elbows, and the like are critical means of mitigating the spread and impact of COVID-19, but the pandemic has also prompted another area of concern: cybersecurity. A growing remote workforce, more collective time online, and increasingly frequent social engineering attacks that take advantage of public curiosity about and fear of the novel coronavirus are exposing system and network vulnerabilities. Remote workers can increase their online safety by refreshing and ramping up cyber-hygiene best practices, including learning to recognize and report suspicious emails and protecting home internet connections.

A Healthcare Digitization Framework: 5 Strategies

While most consumer-oriented industries have turned to mobile-first, cloud-based platforms for consumer interaction, healthcare lags behind in digitization, particularly when it comes to self-service consumer engagement. As digital consumer interaction increasingly drives enterprise success, healthcare must join the modern digital playing field. To get there, organizations need to establish digital investment and enablement frameworks and can then follow five strategies for stable, scalable transformation:

1. Formally define “digital” for the organization.
2. Follow 10 guiding principles to support digital.
3. Divide technology into appropriate portfolios.
4. Develop an analogy to explain the integrated portfolio approach.
5. Strategically select vendor partners.

Four Keys to Increase Healthcare Market Share

With leadership alignment, easy access to data, and a roadmap to reach their objectives, health systems can drastically increase revenue and grow market share by applying four principles:

• Key 1. Alignment.
• Key 2. Vehicles.
• Key 3: Five tools: access to data, data acumen; finance, vision to execution, and prioritizing outcomes.
• Key 4: Education.

Access to the right data can drive changes that generate $48M in revenue, surpassing the year three market share goals in year two.

A Healthcare Mergers Framework: How to Accelerate the Benefits

Health system mergers can promise significant savings for participating organizations. Research, however, indicates as much as a tenfold gap between expectation and reality, with systems looking for a savings of 15 percent but more likely to realize savings around 1.5 percent. Driving the merger expectation-reality disparity is a complex process that, without diligent preparation and strategy, makes it difficult for organizations to fully leverage cost synergies. With the right framework, however, health systems can achieve the process management, data sharing, and governance structure to align leadership, clinicians, and all stakeholders around merger goals.

Improving Strategic Engagement for Healthcare CIOs with Five Key Questions

A healthcare CIO’s role can demand such an intense focus on technology that IT leaders may struggle to find natural opportunities to engage with their C-suite peers in non-technical conversations. To bridge the gap, healthcare CIOs can answer five fundamental questions to better align their programs with organizational strategic goals and guide IT services to their full potential:

1. Whom do we serve?
2. What services do we provide?
3. How do we know we are doing a great job?
4. How do we provide the services?
5. How do we organize?

The Health Catalyst IPO: Continuing Our Mission

On July 25, 2019, our Health Catalyst CEO, Dan Burton, the rest of the executive leadership team, and dozens of fellow team members celebrated the Health Catalyst IPO in New York City. More than 700 team members and their families all over the world joined the celebration during events held locally—from Salt Lake City to Boston to Columbus to Singapore. This was a day long-in-the-making, starting with our prescient co-founders Tom Burton and Steve Barlow in 2008. From those early days onward, Health Catalyst has been a mission-driven company committed to being the catalyst for massive, measurable, data-informed healthcare improvement.

Engaging Health System Boards of Trustees in Quality and Safety: Six Must-Know Guidelines

The quality and patient safety movement of the early 21^st century called for greater board of trustee involvement in improvement. However, too many health systems still don’t have the resources in place to effectively engage their boards around quality and safety measures. Six guidelines describe how organizations can better leverage data to inform their boards:

1. Emphasize quality and patient safety goals.
2. Leverage National Quality Forum-endorsed measures.
3. Use benchmarking and risk adjustment to select targets.
4. Access data beyond the EHR.
5. Provide data and information for multiple organizational levels.
6. Develop a board-specific measurement and presentation strategy.

Health Catalyst Named 2019 Healthcare IT Corporate Innovator

Utah HIMSS (UHIMSS) recognized Health Catalyst for its innovative leadership with the 2019 UHIMSS Healthcare IT Corporate Innovator award. Dale Sanders, Health Catalyst President of Technology, accepted the honor on behalf of his organization at the UHIMSS 2019 spring conference on May 17. He shared some key insights into what makes a great environment for ongoing innovation, including these valuable sources for invention and originality:

1. Mischief
2. Humor
3. Depression
4. Pen and paper
5. Naivety
6. Pattern recognition
7. Walking

The Future of Employer Health Insurance

Employers are always looking for ways to reduce one of their biggest expenditures–the cost of providing health insurance to employees. Many employers have explored solutions such as adding wellness plans, reducing usage, and providing different provider access mechanisms, all with modest success. Stemming the rising costs of health insurance requires management to understand and improve healthcare outcomes for their employee and dependent populations. Changing the future of employer health insurance will require a multi-faceted approach:

1. Driving additional value by reducing utilization of healthcare services within these employer populations.
2. Utilizing a wider lens through which to view performance of various providers, then making decisions based on those who are consistently providing low cost, high quality care.
3. Employer will need to combine their data with other companies across a geographic region to get a better picture of the provider landscape than has ever been possible before.

The Top Five 2019 Healthcare Trends

Bobbi Brown, MBA, and Stephen Grossbart, PhD have analyzed the biggest changes in the healthcare industry and 2018 and forecasted the trends to watch for in 2019. This report, based on their January 2019, covers the biggest 2019 healthcare trends, including the following:

• The business of healthcare including new market entrants, business models and shifting strategies to stay competitive.
• Increased consumer demand for more transparency
• Continuous quality and cost control monitoring across populations.
• CMS proposals to push ACOs into two-sided risk models.
• Fewer process measures but more quality outcomes scrutiny for providers.