The following is a guest article by Matthew Wilson, Senior Vice President of Healthcare Strategy at Infor.
Every health system across the globe strives to consistently deliver great treatment outcomes. In pursuit of that mission, many have upgraded their clinical operations with expansive surgical suites, state-of-the-art medical devices and orchestrated treatments with advanced electronic health records (EHRs).
Unfortunately, their gleaming exteriors often mask deficiencies in the application of business services to healthcare delivery. Fragmented business practices make healthcare delivery more wasteful, expensive and depersonalized.
To manage the business of healthcare, many health systems today rely on legacy approaches to conduct enterprise resource planning (ERP). Consequently, they apply suboptimal point solutions for planning, purchasing, inventory control, sales, marketing, finance, human resources, and other vital ERP functions. Furthermore, point solutions offer piecemeal performance measurement and miss larger opportunities to identify synergies between and across business and clinical functions.
The Power of Platforming
Across industries, business models are evolving to develop Amazon-like platforms that assemble digitally connected networks designed to deliver competitively priced products and services tailored to customer needs and preferences.
Platform companies focus on outputs, not ownership and production control. Platforming’s managerial “art” comes by organizing the company’s owned, partnered, and contracted activities in ways that give customers the products and services they want at competitive prices. Getting this formula right is a key factor toward market success.
Importantly, platform companies integrate their operations and business support functions seamlessly to drive better real-time decision-making, efficient resource allocation, and continuous performance improvement. In this way, finance, human capital management, supply chain and other ERP functions integrate with operations to drive better outputs.
The future of healthcare belongs to platform companies that integrate clinical and business operations to support delivery of value-based care. Like all successful platform companies, successful platforming healthcare companies will run on deep, interoperable data systems, achieve the right people-technology balance, and win market share by delighting consumers.
It’s Time to Abandon ERP Siloes
Legacy ERP systems do not work for platforming companies. Most health systems manage critical ERP functions in silos with single-focus software programs. Finance creates the general ledger. HR does talent management. Supply chain conducts purchasing.
Even when dressed up, traditional ERP business solutions lack the transformative power to meet consumer demands for on demand, transparent, affordable, convenient and personalized healthcare services. Fortunately, a new ERP paradigm is here to help. Platformed ERP business solutions integrate with existing clinical systems to deliver revolutionary healthcare services.
Out with the Old, In with the New
So, out with tired ERP silos, and in with cohesive business platforms. ERP should be a strategic resource within health systems. By providing broad and deep business functionality that integrates with existing EHRs, health systems can create functional AI convergence between clinical and business activities. For example, managed integration services that connect EHR and ERP platforms can provide various types of value to organizations, including more accurate utilization metrics that provide the opportunity to reduce inventory levels and allow clinical personnel to focus on patient care instead of performing inventory counts. By synchronizing the EHR and ERP platforms and eliminating or automating legacy manual processes, organizations’ overall productivity will increase.
Within all modern organizations, software systems strive to enhance human performance, not detract from it. Health systems are no different, yet the dominance of clinical systems often overwhelms the effectiveness of business software services. The status quo offers significant room for improvement.
Health systems have invested heavily in EHRs to drive better, more consistent treatment outcomes. Quality and outcomes are the cornerstones of the clinical operations. Engaged patients and clinicians work together to find the right diagnoses and appropriate treatments to achieve the best outcomes. At the same time, health systems must collect revenue for the treatments they provide in a timely manner to sustain operations.
Health systems need their business platforms to complement their clinical processes to drive enterprise-wide performance improvement. This occurs by embedding functionality within business software to capture, integrate and act upon clinical data.
The opportunities for driving better outcomes through aligned clinical and business platforms are endless, including:
- Creating understandable and transparent treatment boards for patients and families
- Reducing clinician turnover by leveraging science-based risk indicators and supporting continuous professional engagement
- Applying clinical and business analytics to support holistic, real-time decision-making
- Reducing equipment downtime, protecting revenue and improving the patient experience
- Leveraging more accurate cost data to support value-based negotiations with payers
Healthcare’s Next Big Leap
The good news is that health systems do not have to create these powerful and convergent capabilities in isolation. They can enlist strategic partners to augment their clinical and business platforms. By focusing on outputs and assembling capabilities linked through interoperable data exchange, health systems are equipped to deliver better, more personalized services to healthcare consumers.
