EXECUTIVE BRIEF
All healthcare workers want to deliver great treatment outcomes. To achieve this mission many health systems across the globe are upgrading their clinical operations with surgical suites, state-of-the-art medical devices, and orchestrated treatments with advanced electronic health records (EHRs). But these gleaming exteriors often mask deficiencies in the application of business services to healthcare delivery.
Too many of today’s health systems still rely on legacy or suboptimal point solutions for planning, purchasing, inventory control, sales, marketing, finance, human resources, and other vital functions. These point solutions offer piecemeal performance measurement and miss larger opportunities to identify the synergies between business and clinical functions.
In other words, even the most modern institutions in the world can suffer from fragmented business practices that make healthcare delivery more wasteful, expensive, and depersonalized.
In today’s challenging environment, healthcare institutions need revolutionary services to deliver exceptional care. For institutions ready to embrace change, the integration of platformed business solutions with clinical systems is creating a new ERP paradigm that’s providing improved patient outcomes.
In healthcare and beyond, business models are evolving to embrace Amazon-like platforms that assemble digitally connected networks designed to deliver competitively priced products and services tailored to customer needs and preferences.
At a high level, platform companies focus on outputs, not ownership and production control. Platforming’s managerial “art” comes by organizing an organization’s owned, partnered, and contracted activities to give its customers the products and services they want at competitive prices. Getting this formula right is a key factor toward market success.
Platform companies integrate finance, human capital management, supply chain, and other ERP functions together with operations to drive better outputs. This enables operations and business support teams to drive better real-time decision making, efficient resource allocation, and continuous performance improvement.
The future of healthcare belongs to platform companies that integrate clinical and business operations to deliver value-based care. Successful platforming for healthcare institutions will run on deep, interoperable data systems, achieve the right people-technology balance, and win market share by delighting consumers.
Legacy ERP systems don’t 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 connects the mission of healthcare with the business of healthcare by integrating financials, supply chain, and human resources with clinical systems to deliver revolutionary healthcare services on one operational platform.
Modern, platformed ERP should be a strategic resource within your health system. Your software systems should be there to help your people to deliver exceptional care, not keep them from this mission. 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 their 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 healthcare industry software to capture, integrate, and act upon clinical data.