Healthcare leaders across the U.S. are all asking the same question: How can we help our organization recover from the impacts of COVID-19? There’s no playbook for identifying new revenue streams to make up the time and revenue lost when all non-essential procedures ceased, but insights from existing data can help pave the road to recovery.

Visibility into business areas like service line volume, costs, and profitability metrics gives finance and planning teams an important head start toward answering key recovery questions. The e-book COVID-19: Costing & Reporting Considerations for Recovery outlines how healthcare organizations can use data to drive the business forward, shifting and growing capacities where they make financial sense.

 

Trends reporting and analysis

Fully understanding how COVID-19 disruptions impact financial health is key to driving recovery decisions. Capturing all COVID-19 costs in a reviewable model uncovers the indicators, such as patient-level costs and profitability analytics, that can point to potential service lines or ones that may require divestiture to free up funds for acquisitions in other areas.

Advanced cost accounting and decision support capabilities can effectively measure, manage, and analyze trends across all service lines and time periods to guide recovery and planning. System integration and careful costing practices can ensure systems analyze accurate data to accurately calculate costs and compare population trends across a variety of volume, financial, and clinical measures.

 

Identifying service line improvement opportunities

Determining the best mix of service line growth and drawdown occurs during data interpretation. Identifying the most profitable services and patients helps finance leaders define volume and mix levels that most impact revenue and overall profitability.

Organizations must also consider the backlog of elective procedures due to COVID-19. Modeling various patient volumes and running “what-if” simulations helps organizations evaluate when to extend hours or schedule weekend work to improve throughput. This approach is equally important when deciding where to place resources to optimize revenue.

 

Costing data and analysis in action: After extensive review, a hospital discovers a trend in transferring patients with a particular condition versus keeping them in-patient during treatment.

To determine the potential of this possible new service line, the organization can create models based on current performance with continuing transfers and, alternatively, what costs and estimated reimbursements would be associated with keeping the patient. Similarly, modeling can determine what service lines to potentially divest, with an emphasis on evaluating the downstream, bottom-line impacts.

 

Learn more about how to recover using cost accounting tools

Read about how to use data to guide recovery planning in COVID-19: Costing & Reporting Considerations for Recovery. Then preview the reporting, visualizations, and analysis tools available in Axiom™ Cost Accounting and Decision Support solutions, designed to help:

  • Identify patient populations with revenue potential
  • Measure and model return of previous patient volumes
  • Identify financial impact due to COVID-19 disruption

As COVID-19 continues to evolve, cutting costs while finding new revenue streams will remain a priority for hospitals and health systems.