Legacy Health Opts for Strata's Continuous Cost Improvement Solution

Strata Decision Technology reported that Legacy Health has selected StrataJazz Continuous Cost Improvement (CCI).

The health system also signed a five-year extension to continue leveraging StrataJazz for Decision Support, Budgeting, Capital, Long- Range Financial Planning, Rolling Forecasting, Productivity Reporting, and Management Reporting.

In a release, the non-profit health system based in Portland, Oregon noted that it was the first healthcare system in the industry to achieve HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model Stage 7 across all hospitals and ambulatory care clinics. They have been a Strata client since 2005 and with the implementation of CCI will now have the complete StrataJazz platform in place.

"In the same way that Epic provides us with a single clinical platform, we felt it was critical to have a single enterprise-wide financial platform to support and simplify financial planning, decision support and cost management. We need a program that enables us to better understand cost drivers and to take action," said John Kenagy, PhD, Senior Vice president and Chief Information Officer at Legacy. "We have been working with Strata for the last ten years. They have effectively collaborated with Epic to support our strategy of bringing our clinical and financial data together to deliver better outcomes."

The groups reported that Legacy will complete its implementation of StrataJazz Continuous Cost Improvement in late 2015. Legacy has already made major advances in efficiency through its use of StrataJazz, including significant improvements to their cost accounting process. The full process now takes less than one hour to run now compared to five days in the past, over a 99 percent increase in efficiency. The health system also reduced the number of FTEs working on financial decision support from eight to five because of the massive improvement in efficiency of the application and its processes.

In addition, Legacy is the first health system to implement two- way integration between StrataJazz and Epic, pulling data from their Epic Electronic Health Record (EHR) into StrataJazz and also sending cost data from StrataJazz back into their Epic Cogito Data Warehouse. Legacy is now able to send cost data from StrataJazz into Epic Cogito as often as daily. Access to this cost data facilitates collaboration between physicians and finance team in identifying and reducing costs while still providing top quality care.

"We developed Continuous Cost Improvement for organizations like Legacy that are looking for better data to drive continuous improvement efforts from both a clinical and financial perspective," said Dan Michelson, Chief Executive Officer of Strata. "We are excited to expand our partnership with Legacy into a full financial analytics and performance platform and look forward to continuing to support their team."

Legacy already leverages StrataJazz as a single unified platform for Decision Support, Budgeting, Capital, Long-Range Financial Planning, Rolling Forecasting, Productivity Reporting, and Management Reporting system-wide. StrataJazz integrates with Legacy's EHR from Epic and its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool from Infor.

Legacy Health, Oregon's only locally owned nonprofit healthcare organization, includes Legacy Emanuel Medical Center, Randall Children's Hospital at Legacy Emanuel, Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center, Legacy Meridian Park Medical Center, Legacy Mount Hood Medical Center, Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center, Legacy Laboratory Services, Legacy Research, Legacy Medical Group and CareMark/Managed HealthCare Northwest PPO.

More information:

www.stratadecision.com

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