Overview
Healthcare organizations face significant challenges in today's strained economic environment: limited access to capital markets, reduced charitable giving, increased charity care, higher emergent care visits and reduced, higher-margin, elective procedures.
Many healthcare organizations are struggling to balance this "perfect storm" in their finances with ever-increasing demands for higher-quality outcomes, the mandate for EMR and their patient-centered mission and purpose. Allocating precious resources, particularly capital, even during prosperous times can be difficult. During an economic crisis the challenge can, at times, seem insurmountable given the myriad of constraints.
In order to successfully navigate today's turbulent economic waters, healthcare organizations that want to not only survive but thrive need to have a comprehensive, integrated Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) platform to identify both risks and opportunities early in order to make timely decisions. Key elements of a comprehensive, integrated EPM platform include:
Long-Range Planning
Strategic plans and long-range plans are the roadmaps to the future for high-performance healthcare organizations. Percentix specializes in the development and integration of strategic and long-range plans. They keys to having effective strategic and long-range plans include:
- An organizationally aligned and action-oriented mission statement
- Strategic goals that are both quantifiable and have executive sponsorship
- Achievable checkpoints, milestones and timelines
M&A and Debt Capacity Planning
Growth through acquisition can provide organizations a way both enter new markets and geographies as well as attain economies of scale in short timelines not achievable through organic growth alone. However, if not managed properly, the financing used to make acquisitions can become a lodestone and negate the operational benefits that transactions were meant to provide. Percentix brings a wealth of knowledge around using financing effectively to our clients and specializes in tying pre-acquisition analysis into post-acquisition integration. Percentix can help your organization with:
- Modeling financing options and transaction synergies
- Integrating capital budgets with financing capacity
Annual Budgeting and Forecasting
Budgeting, planning and forecasting provide the short-term goals that allow healthcare organizations to achieve long-term success. Having an annual plan that captures your short-term goals and can be tracked against your actual results sounds easy, but takes many healthcare organizations months to complete. Percentix can help your organization align the people, process and tools used in budgeting and planning so your organization spends its time achieving your organization's goals, not working overtime trying to determine what those goals are. Percentix specializes in:
- Annual budgeting and planning
- Periodic and rolling forecasts
Capital Asset Planning
Capital asset and capital expense planning can be the keys to growth for many healthcare organizations. Capital assets and projects provide the tools necessary to execute on your organization's vision. Determining what projects are worthy of funding and in what order is the challenge many organizations struggle with.
The strategic planning process should provide the target "mix" of spending, by mission-related category or initiative across the organization. Ensuring that only the appropriate level of spending for each mission-related category or initiative is approved and/or helping approvers understand that the target mix needs to be adjusted based on current needs is a key requirement to have a mission-driven, financially sustainable capital plan.
The ability to both rank and sort projects in a quantitative way gives context to the qualitative narrative that supports the requests as well as helps approvers identify outliers that may need additional supporting detail. Percentix can help your organization with:
- Capital asset and capital project submission processes
- Capital asset and capital project screening and approval
- Capital asset and capital project tracking and risk mitigation
Percentix has developed an out-of-the-box solution called Oracle Capital Allocation Manager (OCAM) to meet the needs of healthcare organizations. Download the OCAM abstract on this page.
Workforce Planning
Human capital oftentimes represents the largest single cost at many organizations. Accurately planning for changes in your workforce allows departments to plan for new hires and capture the fully-burdened cost of those hires and any transfers in they expect. Healthcare organizations face increased challenges in this area because of the highly fragmented nature of their workforce in terms of full-time, part-time, contracted full-time, contracted part-time, contracted flex-time, etc. Percentix specializes in:
- Workforce planning by department and labor category
- Taxation and benefit allocations
Financial Consolidation and Reporting
Many healthcare organizations have grown through mergers and acquisitions over time. Through this process large healthcare systems oftentimes find themselves with numerous and disparate general ledger (GL) systems. Combining these disparate GL systems into a consolidated financial structure can be labor-intensive and time-consuming for already over-burdened accounting and finance departments. Percentix specializes in:
- Integrating multiple general ledger systems
- Designing consolidated charts of accounts that standardize and simply reporting
- Preparing consolidated financial statements (income statement, balance sheet and cash flow)
Reporting and Analytics
Long-range plans, capital budgets, workforce plans and annual budgets are all key components of a comprehensive, integrated EPM platform but if you can't get actuals into the system to do variance reporting, the plans and budgets don't mean very much. In order to make timely, informed decisions, healthcare leaders need to have timely, accurate information that tells answers the following three questions:
- Where are we coming from? (Historical reporting)
- Where are we now? (Variance Reporting)
- Where are we going? (Budgets, Plans and Forecasts)
Percentix has the industry and technical experts to help your organization not only survive but THRIVE in today's economic times by successfully implementing a comprehensive, integrated EPM system at your organization.
The Oracle | Percentix Solution
Oracle's EPM platform provides healthcare organizations with all the tools necessary to build a comprehensive, integrated EPM system. Because Oracle's system is modular and "hot-pluggable" organizations can start with one module and then add the others later if necessary with minimal integration and maximum benefits from the out-of-the-box reporting tools that come with Strategic Finance, Planning, Hyperion Financial Management and Essbase.
