Over the past decade, the level of business complexity for senior living facilities has increased dramatically. Delivering compassionate, attentive and respective care to residents in a cost effective and efficient manner is challenging without the support of a strong technology infrastructure. Upgrading technology allows leaders of long term care facilities to achieve their financial management goals by utilizing modern systems with real- time intelligence across the organization.
Today’s budgeting and financial software offer robust financial and reporting tools on personalized dashboards that can eliminate the need for tedious Excel reporting. Data can be “sliced and diced” as needed to provide deeper insight and intelligence across operations. Management can self-serve their individual reports and be assured that they can only see the reports they are allowed to see. This eliminates the tiresome month-end work of creating reports and sending them individually to the appropriate individuals. Drill down capabilities everywhere on any report can allow department or location managers to manage their budgets quickly and efficiently as well as allow auditors quicker and easier access to the data.
Drilling down also allows management the benefit of getting real-time insight to make better financial decisions. You are probably familiar with the term Corporate Performance Management (CPM). In Senior Living, CPM systems are especially critical. Organizations often have independent CRM, ERP, Budgeting, and clinical software along with a myriad of Excel files that contain critical information. By utilizing a Data Warehouse solution, all these silos of information to be combined into one data source.
Senior Living use a slightly different model for budgeting than other healthcare industries due to different lines of business they are in, such as independent living, transitional care, skilled nursing, home health and hospice. Most of these different sectors go by models that are either patient driven or payor driven which financial data does not necessarily provide. Census counts, revenue by payors, quality of care are all driving the budgeting. CPM allows all this information to be centralized in one system which can be tailored to create complex budgeting models for more accurate results.
Do not allow your systems to manage you and your time. Instead, employ some of the newer and more robust systems to enable technology, data, and people to efficiently work together as one. Successful Senior Living sites take the following into account when evaluating a CPM system:
1) Think outside of the box – how to use non-financial data and how to use the Data Warehouse for budgeting process
2) Define sources of non-financial data to be used for budgeting purposes
3) Using key statistical/performance indicators (KPIs) and data to manage the day to day business
The right CPM solutions will help an organization understand their business model, understand the multiple lines of business, understand the financial data and how it's structured, as well as the operational data and how that is structured. This allows a facility to spend time analyzing data, rather than digging into systems.