Financial Signaling & Operational Analytics in Academic Medical Centers

Academic medical centers currently face a variety of financial and operational challenges, in both the short and long term. In the short term, the current COVID-19 pandemic brings abundant challenges, and in the long term, industry evolution remains a constant challenge.

Many of these challenges are shared across the healthcare industry, but academic hospitals face particularly increased complexity and unique situations. Why? Well, they must manage multiple funding sources and complex fund flows between the university, hospital and physician groups – all while also managing wide-ranging activities that include research, teaching, patient care and more.

Transforming the Office of Finance

The recent economic crisis has made one thing clear for academic medical center Finance leaders: they're facing a new inflection point in the evolution of the Office of Finance. Why is this? Well, as they look to leverage modern technology to evolve their planning and reporting capabilities, the pandemic has emphasized the need for enhanced insight and agility – both of which are essential to react effectively to changing conditions as they occur rather than waiting on the traditional month-end close and reporting cycle. Additionally, these Finance leaders recognize the need to build efficiency in their period-end close process to enable their teams to spend on analysis and decision guidance.

Unfortunately, many medical school Finance teams find themselves hampered while managing their period-end close and reporting cycles with outdated and fragmented point solutions, disparate spreadsheets and siloed data. Many of these teams, constrained by legacy corporate performance management (CPM) solutions, find themselves wasting time managing systems and data. Instead, they should be adding value with insights and immediate operational and financial guidance. And now they can.

Lead at Speed with Financial Signaling & Operational Analytics

To add value and answer the challenges of today – and tomorrow – academic medical center Finance leaders require a modern solution to break their reliance on the month-end reporting cycle. To decipher the hidden signals within large volumes of daily and weekly operational data. And to gain access to "right time" insights, such as return volume, service-line revenue, admissions, capacity and labor productivity.

In our recent solution brief, "Solutions for Academic Medical Centers," we discuss how OneStream's Intelligent Finance platform empowers academic medical Finance leaders to lead at speed with financial signaling (see Figure 1). How? By ensuring these leaders have the agility to react to a rapidly changing economic landscape.

OneStream enables Finance Transformation with a unified platform for financial close & consolidation, budgeting, planning & forecasting, and reporting. By integrating directly with multiple financial and operational data sources, OneStream's analytic blending intelligently unifies large volumes of transactional data with summarized financial data to create new insights. Financial and Operational leaders gain access to this information through rich, self-service dashboards and interactive reports, allowing leaders to uncover the hidden signals in the daily flow of information.

Figure 1 - Financial Signaling in Action

Unleash Finance Leaders and Key Decision-Makers

OneStream enables Finance teams to maintain trust in the governed financial book-of-record while empowering key decision-makers with the agility required to make changes and impact financials before month-end. Here are just some of OneStream's key capabilities related to financial signaling and operational analytics:

• Financial Intelligence – Provides pre-built understanding of accounts, currency, ownership, intercompany eliminations and hierarchies to create operationally relevant signals and insights on daily and weekly operational KPIs.
• Analytic Blend – Intelligently combines millions of rows of daily or weekly transactional data from various sources (ERP, CRM, HCM, DW) with governed financial data, analytics, and financial and operational KPIs to enable comprehensive analysis and visualization directly within one application.
• Self-Service Visualizations – Empower Finance teams and Operational leaders with dynamic visualizations and executive dashboards for financial and operational reporting to guide rapid-response decisions.

OneStream also streamlines annual financial report production through automated data loading, reconciliation and reporting. These processes ultimately enable Finance teams to spend less time on the close process and more time on a value-added focus, such as analysis and decision guidance.

OneStream In Action

For a public university that is part of the Southeast's most comprehensive academic health center and one of the nation's Top 10 public research universities, OneStream enables visibility into their clinical, accounting, classroom and hospital needs. With OneStream, the university's 125+ users have confidence and control of their data at the transactional level enabling improved metric tracking for their College of Medicine including number of visits, type of patient, insurance information and more.

Conclusion

OneStream's Intelligent Finance Platform unleashes academic medical center Finance teams from the constraints of managing legacy applications and disparate tools – by providing insights stemming from the financial signaling and operational analytics capabilities. These Finance teams can then quickly discern timely, actionable insights and lead at speed with continuous performance guidance.

Learn More

To learn more, download our "OneStream Solutions for Academic Medical Centers" solution brief, or contact us for a demonstration.