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The right data mix for facility market planning

Female doctor reviewing data mix on a tablet.

Strategic growth requires knowledge of how key healthcare industry drivers impact your market. Understanding factors such as population demographics, economics and competitors in the marketplace enables you to make sound decisions about how and where to provide care.

With so many global pressures on healthcare, it’s important to remember a crucial industry principle: healthcare is local. Better data ensures your local lens is as clear as possible.

Assess your data capabilities

How you assess your strategic planning data mirrors how you should assess your market: start from the inside out, maximize the resources you have, and identify and fill the gaps. A few key questions include:

  • Which data sets already deliver strong service line insights?
  • How can we leverage this data to identify more savings, growth and care redesign opportunities?
  • What data is needed to make expansion decisions related to patients, services, settings and provider partners?

For New York hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers, the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System is a core data set. Using SPARCS, facilities can compare their clinical, discharge and transfer statistics to local competitors. Knowing that more patients go to a rival hospital for cardiac care, for example, is the first step to reversing that trend.

But what if you want a more granular view of how, for example, your cardiovascular inpatient volume has decreased? Sg2 reports that many hospitals have experienced inpatient declines over the last decade as outpatient care has grown.* The “what” and the “why” of those declines may be very specific to your facility.

Add layers, tell better stories

More robust data can help you drill deeper from the service line level into disease-specific care families and precise procedure groups. This kind of data can help capitalize on the predicted return of cardiac inpatient volumes and the continued outpatient growth in sub-specialties such as dysrhythmia and heart valve disease (additional Sg2 projections through 2029).*

Cardiac is just one example. With more data and analytics at the micro level, you can create a local market strategy that is designed to optimize service line mix, increase revenues and margins, and expand your footprint.

If it feels like your strategic plan needs to be updated as soon as you create it, DataGen can help. Our real-time knowledge of SPARCS data and Sg2’s MarketEdge helps you understand your position in the New York market and how to improve it. Contact us today to get started.

* Sg2. Snapshot 2021: Cardiovascular. February 18, 2022. https://www.sg2.com/resource-library/download-a-pdf/cardiovascular-service-line-snapshot/.

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