Huron Healthcare: Hospital Executives' Most Pressing Issues Moving From Volume To Value

Huron Healthcare recently released perspectives on what's top of mind for hospital executives and how providers can make the move from volume to value without harming their bottom lines.

Curt Whelan, managing director at Huron Healthcare, details the five key issues regarding the transition from volume to value:

• Recognizing the Need for New Competencies: "The big top-of-mind issue for hospital executives is the three levels of competency they need to develop: provider competency, payer competency, and physician competency. Leading CEOs across the country are very focused on these three things."
• Adopting a Transformation Mindset: "Hospital executives have been conceptualizing ideas about new payment models and care delivery transformation for a long time. Now they're taking action, and making investments in transforming their organizations."
• Building a Foundation of Operational Excellence: "A lot of hospitals are moving toward population-based management. However, there are a lot of foundational improvements still available within their current operations. We're finding that organizations across the country—sizable organizations anywhere from six to 15 hospitals—have well over $100M in foundational operational improvement opportunities. Getting to peak performance requires hyper focus."
• Timing the Transition to New Payment and Care Models: "The question for many executives is timing. Some of them are progressing quickly toward new models of care. Others are staying conservative. It's important for executives to understand their markets relative to payer readiness for new models, what their competitors are doing, and what their organization's capabilities are as they make decisions about when to move to new models."
• Considering Your Current Revenue Base: "The time for action is now, but providers are still stuck in the gap between payment systems. If they move too quickly, they end up alienating revenue on the fee-for-service side. If they don't move quickly enough, they may find themselves carved out of networks due to narrow network deals, etc."

Whelan discussed this topic in a Hospitals & Health Networks video entitled, “What’s Top of Mind for Hospital Leaders.”

This year, Huron Healthcare has released several reports addressing the important issues facing hospitals, health systems, and academic medical centers, including:

• “Inventing the Future of Healthcare: Top CEOs on the Real Work of Transforming the Healthcare Industry,” which provides insights from 30 leading healthcare CEOs on their visions for the future. Read the 2013 CEO Forum report at: http://www.healthcareceoforum.com/.
• “Ten Overlooked Opportunities for Significant Performance Improvement and Cost Savings,” which provides cost saving tips and highlights 10 areas for performance improvement at hospitals and health systems, along with insights on key challenges of implementing change in each of these areas and self-assessment questions providers can use to identify opportunities.
• “Innovation In Action: Insights on Achieving Healthcare Transformation,” which highlights three key areas around healthcare transformation, focusing in particular on revenue transition, clinical transformation, and the underlying strategic changes necessary to put innovation into action from Huron Healthcare executives and Huron Healthcare’s Advisory Council.

About Huron Healthcare
Huron Healthcare is the premier provider of performance improvement and clinical transformation solutions for hospitals and health systems. By partnering with clients, Huron delivers solutions that improve quality, increase revenue, reduce expenses, and enhance physician, patient, and employee satisfaction across the healthcare enterprise. Clients include leading national and regional integrated healthcare systems, academic medical centers, community hospitals and physician practices. Modern Healthcare ranked Huron Healthcare third on its 2013 list of the largest healthcare management consulting firms. For more information, visit www.huronconsultinggroup.com/healthcare.

About Huron Consulting Group
Huron Consulting Group helps clients in diverse industries improve performance, reduce costs, leverage technology, process and review large amounts of complex data, address regulatory changes, recover from distress and stimulate growth. Our professionals employ their expertise in administration, management, finance, operations, strategy and technology to provide our clients with specialized analyses and customized advice and solutions that are tailored to address each client's particular challenges and opportunities to deliver sustainable and measurable results. The Company provides consulting services to a wide variety of both financially sound and distressed organizations, including healthcare organizations, leading academic institutions, Fortune 500 companies, governmental entities and law firms. Huron has worked with more than 95 of the top 100 research universities, more than 400 corporate general counsel, and more than 385 hospitals and academic medical centers. For more information, visit www.huronconsultinggroup.com.