Philadelphia-based Temple University Health System is using a new accounting software that enables an unprecedented level of specificity when it comes to how the organization tracks the costs of delivering care.
Since last year, the health system has been using a program called PowerCosting that allows it to combine financial and clinical information to drill down on costs and allocate funds most appropriately, executives told The Philadelphia Inquirer. For example, the health system can track medications and supplies used in patients' care via the EHR. It also allows leaders to see how much time a patient spends at different stages of care, which enables the system to allocate labor costs more accurately.
"It allows us to budget from reality," Mike Young, CEO of Temple University Health System, told the news outlet.
Leaders described a specific use case in which time stamps showed CT scans for neurological cases take about two hours, while the same scan takes 20 minutes for a broken hip. In response, they allocated more labor costs for CT scans than for orthopedics.
The cost accounting system is also used to compare patient outcomes and costs by physician, and to quantify how much the system spends on services for which it does not get reimbursed This is a critical metric because hospitals are not paid for extra days when patients who are ready to be transferred to another care setting remain in the hospital due to downstream capacity and insurance-related bottlenecks. The software uncovered just how much Temple spends for patients on ventilators and getting dialysis in these scenarios.
"We can start to build that argument, 'Hey, this is not generically costing hospitals money. Here's the exact dollar figure that this costs — day by day, for every excess day in the hospital,'" Daniel del Portal, MD, senior vice president of medical operations and chief clinical officer at the system, told the news outlet.