Modern FP&A Healthcare: Precise Planning & Forecasting

Today, it’s a fast-paced business world. As change continues to add uncertainty to the healthcare sector, finance leaders remain tasked with effectively analyzing, monitoring and predicting the financial performance of their organizations.

The Shift to Modern FP&A

Unprecedented cost pressures, along with regulatory and reimbursement issues and diverse revenue sources, all add complexity to the budgeting and planning process for healthcare organizations. Managing payroll is also complex, often combining collective bargaining units, seasonal and per-diem employees, and other professionals. Healthcare finance teams need to be able to plan for patient volumes, payer mix, reimbursement rates, location consolidations and operating margins at a moment's notice. All of which require instant access to critical financial information and data to deliver insights and recommend strategies that lead to overall company growth.

As such, a healthcare organization’s financial plan is the most critical tool for ensuring that the organization is efficient, profitable, and poised for both short and long-term success. That's why many healthcare organizations are looking to automate and integrate financial planning functions, with the use of cloud financial planning and analysis software where they can:

• Manage all budgeting, financial planning and forecasting with a single, modern, cloud software solution seamlessly integrated with your GL, no more trying to manage and reconcile multiple platforms.
  
• Get an accurate, holistic view of every aspect of your business with a single source of truth so you can deliver the financial intelligence your leadership needs to make faster, more confident decisions.
  
• Accelerate your budgeting cycles and minimize the risk of data errors. You’ll be able to free up Finance staff from repetitive, manual tasks so they can focus on strategic planning to lead your organization’s growth and success, while always maintaining accurate and compliant data.

Finance teams that embrace digital transformation and recognize the value of moving to a modern FP&A solution are better equipped to adapt to market changes, take intelligent risks, and capitalize swiftly on new opportunities.

A Checklist for Healthcare Organizations:

No matter the size of your healthcare organization, predictive financial planning and forecasting is critical for ensuring that you are efficient and sustainable, and even more critical during times of uncertainty. With a modern solution, you’ll have a better, more strategic and accurate view of your financial health and performance.

Generate detailed personnel plans. Personnel plans are the largest and most complex aspect of a healthcare organizations budget. Using a modern FP&A solution streamlines the complexity by automatically calculating employee-specific fringe benefits, taxes, and other costs for accurate resource planning, as well as managing other employee-related costs such as ongoing training and certifications.

Drive headcount requirements based on census. Create precise income plans based on accurate historical data. Ensure plans are driver based, and are based upon key metrics and key healthcare performance indicators KPIs such as type of service, length of patient stays, patient visits, patient insurance policy, number of patient beds, contractual allowances, and so on. 

Track and control costs. Healthcare costs are under scrutiny, with HR departments, regulators and patients demanding insight into charges. A modern FP&A platform helps you understand your costs, and report on them. Compile detailed cost analyses by doctor, physician, healthcare provider, procedure, or department. Understand your cost of services by measuring and managing provider insurance costs or tracking meal plans and number of patients. Use these insights to allocate your costs optimally, and ultimately drive profitability.

Produce custom healthcare reports. Create income statements by payer, as well as consolidated physician statements of revenue and expenses. Use multiple views and hierarchies i.e. location and doctor for various reporting requirements. Modern FP&A makes it easy to keep a tight watch on the health of your organization with access to timely and robust data in visually meaningful reports and dashboards.

Automate planning processes. Integrate departmental budgets for a consolidated financial view of the organization. Modern FP&A makes it easy to generate revenue, headcount and operations forecasts and adjust for market fluctuations.

Implementing Modern FP&A at Carroll County Memorial Hospital 

Carroll County Memorial Hospital realized the limitations of using Excel for budgeting and planning. In addition to the cumbersome nature of using spreadsheets, with the manual data entry and broken formulas, one of the biggest challenges was not being able to provide the different departments the ability to be involved in their portion of the budgeting process. 

Today, with Centage’s modern FP&A software solution, CCMH builds their annual budget and plan, beginning with their capital budget, then revenue budget and then expenses. Once the annual budget is completed and approved, they rely on Centage’s advanced reporting capabilities to create variance reports that are distributed to the patient care area directors so they can review their own budget vs. actuals and adjust if necessary. Their process is now easier,  more efficient, and fosters collaboration and accountability. 

To learn more about how CCMH is using Centage, read the full case study.

Centage - Modern FP&A for Healthcare

No matter the size of your healthcare organization, predictive financial planning and forecasting is critical for ensuring that you are efficient and sustainable, and even more critical during times of uncertainty. Whether you budget by clinic, physical or procedure or need to track metrics like patient days, beds and visits, Centage can easily accommodate the unique aspects of any healthcare organization and make sophisticated financial planning, budgeting and analysis easy and accessible.