Your Digital Transformation Journey
Data and technology solutions are impacting every part of health care and life sciences, and everyone is on a digital transformation journey. But what does that mean to you and your organization? Does it look like improving your revenue cycle functions? Is it working to automate inefficient manual tasks? Are you trying to understand service line profitability, or does your leadership team need better, real-time data to make strategic decisions? These are all questions we’ve been asked and have helped our clients answer. Here’s how…
Digital Readiness Assessment
Our desire, consistent with our CLA Promise to know our clients, is to better understand the organization and resources available to meet goals. For many, this understanding is achieved using a transparent and collaborative approach we call our “digital readiness assessment.”
The assessment includes one or more discovery sessions with key decision makers, contributors, and other stakeholders through which we work to understand systems, data sources, processes, challenges, and desired improvements. By way of natural conversation around these topics, participants gain visibility into how other team members are performing tasks, best practices, common challenges, and team building through conversation.
The outcome is a catalog of data sources, current and future state diagrams, and use cases. By prioritizing use cases based on impact, effort, and costs, a road map is then drafted to guide the organization to the next destination of its transformation journey, whether near or far.
Understanding the Fundamentals
After a digital readiness assessment, if desired, we then approach projects looking at three fundamental aspects of digital transformation: people, process, and platform/technology.
People. You can have the best technology platform or idea but if you don’t have the people in appropriate roles and skillsets then your project may falter. There is great value in understanding teams, patients, residents, clinicians, physicians, dentists, caregivers, and other stakeholders who will be impacted by the project or solution. The idea is to understand whether there is the necessary knowledge, skills, experience to execute on your digital transformation strategy or if re-education or upskilling, for example, may be necessary. You’ll also want to determine who your champions are and who will lead change management.
Process. We look at processes to help determine if there are opportunities for improvement. Frequently we work with clients on understanding what the problems are and can review processes to find efficiencies, improve productivity, utilization, and quality. We also have worked with many clients to reduce their operational budget by leveraging their resources better, eliminating waste and duplicate tasks, along with reducing friction in business processes while improving staff, resident, or client experience.
Platform/Technology. A platform or technology/data can provide strategic advantage and value, but these need to be aligned with the right people and processes to be successful. With respect to technology, key considerations we keep in mind include interoperability, security, and scalability along with how any technology integrates with existing systems. Of course, we always keep the user experience, such as mobile functionality, accessibility among others, in mind as well.
Our Approach in Action
Is your organization interested in saving administrative time for employees so they can focus on patient or resident care and engage in more meaningful work rather than repetitive data entry? If so, our work would include helping you create a digital strategy (if needed), reviewing how you utilize technology, assessing your workflows or processes to determine if there is an opportunity to improve efficiency, quality, and outcomes. Or, perhaps your need is making more strategic operational decisions, but you can’t get your hands on the right data without a lot of manual work. When data is housed in multiple systems that don’t speak to one another, this can be a huge barrier to having synthesized information. We’ve worked to solve this by cataloging data, understanding need, creating data warehouses, and developing robust dashboards.
In general, the themes of our projects are to save time from frequent activities and/or allow infrequent, but time-consuming activities to be performed more efficiently through automation. Again, we work to achieve this through digital readiness assessments, understanding our clients and their businesses coupled with familiarity with the systems relevant to the health care/life sciences industry and/or organizational size. Plus, we have experience and the knowledge of various tools like Python, SQL, Alteryx, Excel, Power BI, and the list goes on.
Example: Moving from time-consuming manual calculations/reports to automated, daily dashboards
One organization engaged us to assist with moving them from a time-consuming manual process for calculating and reporting daily overtime to an automated dashboard which presented labor metrics on a daily basis using time and attendance data. We added the daily overtime logic to the automated process to eliminate the need for manual calculations. The resulting value can be measured in more productivity, value-added activities, improved employee satisfaction and retention, or reduced FTEs (if necessary).
Example: Moving from SQL to low-code tools
Another organization had been using SQL to extract, transform, and process data from one of their systems. They asked us to introduce them to a more “user-friendly” method, creating the opportunity for us to share with them the power of low-code tools, such as Alteryx and Power BI. This allowed them to automate the process of transforming data into actionable intelligence in a way that was documented, repeatable, and scalable. Stakeholders were able to focus on the insights from their data to make tactical and strategic decisions, shifting from wrangling their data to dancing with it.
Example: Upgrading to cloud-based financial platform
Many organizations outgrow their financial platform or enterprise resource planning systems. Whether the driver is scale, such as a growing organization that needs to be consolidated or modernization by moving from an on-premises system to the cloud, there are many benefits from a system upgrade. We help our clients with system selection, implementation, and ongoing support with platforms such as Sage Intacct and Acumatica. Benefits can include cost savings, increased scalability, enhanced security, improved user experience, and added flexibility through customization and integration with other systems.
How CLA can help
If you don’t know where to start, we can help. As we mentioned, the discovery sessions of our digital readiness assessment are a great way to get your transformation juices flowing. Our process is designed to bring the right people around the table (your team and ours) with the right questions to determine your needs and what solutions could help. If you already know your needs/wants, we can move directly into a digital project.
Whether your project is big or small, we have worked with health care and life science clients across the country in their digital transformation journeys. We can help you, too. Reach out today to Ryan Bjerke to start the conversation.
Jennifer Boese is the Director of Health Care Policy at CLA. She is a highly successful public policy, legislative, advocacy and political affairs leader, including working in both the state and federal government as well as the private sector. She brings over 20 years of government relations and public policy knowledge with her to CLA. Well over half of her career has been spent dedicated to health care policy and the health care industry, affording her a deep understanding of the health care market and environment, health care organizations and health care stakeholders. Her role at CLA is to provide thought leadership, policy analysis and strategic insights to health care providers across the continuum related to the industry's ongoing transformation towards value. A key focus of that work is on market innovations and emerging payment models. Her goal is to help CLA clients navigate and thrive in an increasingly dynamic health care environment.
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