How Integrated Reports Empower Hospitals’ Unheralded Heroes: Cost Accountants

They don’t deliver care to patients. They don’t mobilize, manage and motivate teams of healthcare professionals. They don’t design game-changing medial technologies, or conduct groundbreaking research. In fact, the vast majority of folks don’t know exactly what they do (and are fine with that). But make no mistake: unheralded, behind-the-scenes cost accountants play a critical, if not at times heroic role in ensuing that hospitals and health delivery systems are financially efficient, compliant, and competitive into the future.

And yet despite their vital contributions, cost accountants struggle mightily to get the basic data they need to do their jobs. For example, consider a cost accountant who is mandated to gather, classify, analyze, summarize, and allocate costs associated with the organization. As such, she needs to access data such as:

• Charges in order to calculate fixed and variable costs
• Tables that indicate to which departments costs should be allocated
• Budget numbers and actual data
• Type of service, procedures, etc.
• Timeframes

Getting this information should be fast, easy and reliable — except it isn’t, because she must:

• Contact the IT department and request that they download the required data into a file.
• Wait until IT clears their backlog before they can comply with the request.
• Review the file and identify additional supporting data.
• Contact the IT department and request that they download the required data into a file.
• Wait until IT clears their backlog before they can comply with the request.
• Review the file and compare it to the first one, and identify additional supporting data.
• Contact the IT department, and request that they download the required data into a file.
• Review the file and compare it to the first two, and identify additional supporting data.
• Wait until IT clears their backlog before they can comply with the request.

This process repeats again…and again…and again until, finally, the data story is robust enough for her to develop various courses of action and recommendations to control costs. To say that this is tedious and time consuming is an understatement. Flight delays are tedious and time consuming. Pulling weeds in the yard is tedious and time consuming (what’s the big deal — they’re plants, right?). But what cost accountants endure just to do their essentially important job is on another level. It’s punitive. It’s unfair. And even worse: it’s unnecessary.

A Single Healthcare Reporting Source

This is because hospitals can compile disparate healthcare data from across multiple systems — such as linked servers, data pushes, file imports, and even manual entry when required — into a single source report for the organization, and empower cost accountants to rapidly get the data they need, when they need it. For example, instead getting stuck in the request-wait-analyze loop, our formerly beleaguered cost account can:

• Access self-serve tools to efficiently scan pools of data that are refreshed and updated on a daily basis.
• Identify, filter, count, sum and sort the desired information she needs, along with any supporting material.
• Import files with a list of accounts to examine.
• Download and export data into multiple formats, including specialized cost accounting software.
• Upload results in various forms (e.g. budget input, breakeven studies, etc.)

Furthermore, she can execute the above workflow whenever she wants and as often as she needs. There is no need to send request after request (after request) to IT and waste hours of time. Everything is accessible on-demand, which leads to better recommendations and stronger and more financially efficient hospitals and health delivery systems.

In fact, things are likely to get so quiet between the accounting team and the IT team, that the latter may start to feel kind of lonely and send flowers — or at least one of those “thinking of you” email cards.

Learn More

At Polaris, we help cost accountants and their colleagues get the accurate, trusted and actionable data they need to ensure that hospitals and health delivery systems are financially efficient, compliant, and competitive into the future.

To learn more about our solutions, technologies and approach contact Polaris today.