Strata’s Annual User Summit Highlights Challenges and Solutions Associated with Rising Costs and Ongoing Labor Pressures Across Healthcare

Company reveals expanded data capabilities and new price transparency data

CHICAGO, Oct. 23, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Strata Decision Technology (Strata), a leader in the development of cloud-based enterprise performance management tools, unveiled the company’s new and expanded capabilities at LIFT24: The Strata Users Virtual Summit (LIFT24) on Oct. 22-23, 2024. As part of the two-day virtual event, over 2,800 healthcare leaders came together to share best practices, advancements, and advice for tackling the industry’s biggest challenges. Uniting healthcare providers from across the country, LIFT24 enabled collective knowledge sharing amongst over 600 healthcare organizations.

Led by Strata leaders and customer organizations, LIFT24 sessions explored healthcare industry trends and best practices in financial planning, analytics, and performance management. During the event, the company also showcased the latest product innovations and optimizations, such as incorporating AI and machine learning into their solutions and expanding their data and intelligence capabilities. Additionally, sessions highlighted the enhanced Real-Time Labor Performance solution and Payor Rate Transparency data set.

“Amid margin pressure, changing patient volumes, and increases in labor and non-labor expenses, today’s hospitals and healthcare systems face increasingly complex challenges,” said Strata Chief Executive Officer John Martino. “At Strata, we are committed to helping our customers accelerate decision-making and elevate their performance to overcome these challenges and drive their missions. We are excited for the opportunity to bring our network of healthcare finance leaders together for LIFT24 to exchange valuable insights and strategies to navigate an ever-changing healthcare environment.”

Expanded Data & Intelligence Capabilities
Strata continues to build upon its extensive data sets – spanning financial, operational, clinical, and claims data – to help customers benchmark their organizations’ performance relative to data from broader markets, competitors, and peer organizations. This year, Strata integrated data sets from its Comparative Analytics and StrataSphere® data sets to enable one of the industry’s most robust data and analytics platforms. Adding hundreds of hospitals to thousands of metrics for comparison, the company now provides customers with a data set that draws timely market and financial performance data from more than 1,600 hospitals nationwide. Available in both Axiom and StrataJazz enterprise performance management tools, this data spans hospital operating margins, revenues, expenses, and patient volumes, as well as physician practice performance, and other metrics.

In addition, Strata invested in its Reimbursement Intelligence offerings to improve the ways organizations can benchmark and optimize their reimbursements. With an expanded offering for all payor claims remittance data, and a new offering of Payor Rate Transparency data, Strata now gives customers the ability to see actual and negotiated reimbursement rates across their market at the payor, provider, and procedure levels.

Strata Innovation: Payor Rate Transparency and StrataJazz Real-Time Labor Performance
At LIFT24, the company highlighted two recent enhancements to support customers tackling key industry challenges: payor negotiations and rising labor expenses.

• Payor Rate Transparency: Armed with timely, accurate insights on current market rates, healthcare organizations can negotiate more competitive rates with payors, assess opportunities to enter new markets, and define competitive pricing strategies. Strata’s Payor Rate Transparency data set leverages advanced data science techniques to deliver a solution that empowers hospital leaders with normalized, consistent, and easy-to-analyze data.
• StrataJazz Real-Time Labor Performance: Today’s labor expenses in healthcare cannot be attributed to a single cause. Addressing the issue requires collaboration across functions and levels of management, as well as labor performance data integrated with other systems to enable accountability and the ability to act. StrataJazz Real-Time Labor Performance helps organizations reduce labor expenses with utilization improvements through insights, interventions, and outcomes, improving visibility and trust in data.

Agenda Highlights: Peer-led and CPE-Accredited Thought Leadership Sessions at LIFT24
This year, LIFT24 showcased healthcare providers and their use of Strata’s StrataJazz and Axiom for Healthcare enterprise performance management tools. The LIFT24 agenda included more than 10 CPE-accredited sessions on Strata’s latest product innovations, industry trends, and financial planning and analysis strategies such as minimizing patient leakage across provider networks, engaging operations in variance reporting, optimizing capital planning and management, service line planning, and more. Key sessions included:

• Cross-Functional Collaboration at Emory Healthcare: Emory Healthcare shared how they are bridging the gap between finance, clinical, and revenue cycle staff for strong collaboration and decision-making by developing a service-line attribution and accountability model.
• Panel: Improving Financial Management with Strata’s Data Analytics Solutions: Healthcare providers discussed how they are ensuring and maintaining data integrity by using Strata’s data analytics solutions.
• Customer Panel: Managing Holistic Labor Performance: Texas Health Resources shared how they are using a real-time labor performance tool to identify staffing situations driving excessive labor spend and determine outcomes.
• Addressing Revenue Leakage: Strata data experts provided strategies for using Strata market data assets to identify and address full impacts of patient leakage.
• Panel: Perspectives from the Strata Side: Strata leaders who have worked as finance leaders in provider organizations shared stories and best practices to manage industry challenges.

Customer Achievement: 2024 LEAP Award Winners
As part of the two-day event, Strata also recognized two leading healthcare organizations for their outstanding performance in the areas of financial analytics, business intelligence, and decision support. Awarded each year, the LEAP (Lead, Excel, Achieve, and Progress) Award honors exceptional healthcare providers in the Strata network that are solving real-world problems using the company’s enterprise performance management tools and services, driving real, lasting change that benefits their organizations and the patients and communities they serve.

The winners of the 2024 Strata LEAP Award are:

Intermountain Health
As part of its nearly 20-year partnership with Strata, Intermountain Health has continued to find new ways to support and invest in the communities it serves. Using the full StrataJazz platform, Intermountain has leveraged continuous improvement, decision support, and financial planning tools. Adopting StrataJazz Capital Planning in 2006, Intermountain developed increased rigor around the capital planning process by involving leaders at each step. Later in 2019, the organization tackled the challenges of using an annual budget by adopting StrataJazz Financial Planning and the Dynamic Planning methodology. Over the last year, Intermountain has leveraged StrataJazz Continuous Improvement to identify opportunities for cost savings and bridge the gap between the organization’s cost stewardship team and clinical program leaders. To learn more about Intermountain Health’s journey to the LEAP Award, visit: https://www.stratadecision.com/leap-award/.

Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Intermountain Health serves patients and communities as the largest nonprofit health system in the Intermountain West, including Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming. Intermountain provides care at 34 hospitals and 400 clinics, while also providing telehealth services for over 3 million patients.

Monument Health
Like many organizations today, Monument Health continued to feel the impacts of labor shortages coupled with rising labor costs and other related challenges. With workforce optimizations top of mind, the organization leveraged Axiom Performance Reporting and Productivity and Comparative Analytics to develop a new, electronic position control process. Using the Axiom tool, Monument was able to build a cross-discipline dashboard to integrate employee and recruiting data with budget data, enabling more clarity and transparency. Incorporating external benchmarks from Strata’s Comparative Analytics tool, Monument was able to use data to underpin its position requisition process. To learn more about Monument Health’s journey to the LEAP Award, visit: https://www.stratadecision.com/leap-award/.

Headquartered in Rapid City, South Dakota, Monument Health is a community-based healthcare system with a mission to make a difference every day. This system offers care in 31 medical specialties and serves 12 communities across western South Dakota. With over 5,000 physicians and caregivers, Monument Health is composed of five hospitals and more than 40 medical clinics and specialty centers, and is a member of the Mayo Clinic Care Network.

About Strata Decision Technology 
Strata Decision Technology, LLC provides an innovative, cloud-based platform for software, and data and service solutions to help healthcare organizations acquire insights, accelerate decisions, and enhance performance in support of their missions. More than 2,300 organizations rely on Strata’s StrataJazz and Axiom solutions for market-leading service and enterprise performance management software, data, and intelligence solutions. To learn more about Strata and why the company has been named the market leader for Business Decision Support for more than 15 consecutive years, please go to www.stratadecision.com.     

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Media contact: 
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