Provider services and solutions

Financial performance: Cost reduction

The challenge

More indigent patients. Poor credit ratings. Mounting debt. Cutbacks in healthcare spending and reimbursements. Providers—and their investors—are discovering to their dismay that the US healthcare industry is not recession-proof. In this capital-intensive industry, capital is increasingly hard to come by. Already-slim profit margins grow slimmer. Amid the financial turmoil, employers and payers assert that the current healthcare system is unsustainable. Translation to providers: Do more with less.

Clearly you must grow revenue. But that will get the job done only halfway. You must also cut expenses—drive costs out of your operations—to ensure your economic survival.

How we can help you

• Today’s marketplace demands that you improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your clinical and business processes. We can help you identify and remedy shortcomings in your financial management and revenue cycle processes. We can help you revamp and streamline your business processes to accomplish tasks with greater accuracy and less effort. We can help you control supply expenditures by enhancing your current purchasing contract terms. We can improve your cash flow and reduce costs by helping you to join group purchasing organizations to take advantage of competitive contract pricing.
• You should explore nontraditional business arrangements to help stretch your budgeted dollars. We can help you join forces with payers and other providers to offer joint patient care services to make the most of scarce healthcare dollars.
• You need to use state-of-the-art healthcare information technology to streamline your processes and share information across business units. We can maximize the value of your IT investment by using your information infrastructure to cut administrative costs and streamline business processes.
• You should improve the productivity of your staff by better utilizing their high-value skills. We can identify staff redundancies. We can help you deploy your staff where they can contribute maximum value to your organization.

Common services include

• Negotiating competitive contract pricing from vendors
• Exploring the cost-effectiveness of joint ventures and collaborative projects
• Identifying staff redundancies and recommending ways to deploy staff for maximum value
• Leveraging IT resources to cut administrative costs and improve business processes