Health Care Program Advisors Builds Actionable Models with Snowflake, Alteryx, and Tableau

Health Care Program Advisors (HCPA) is a boutique healthcare consulting firm based in Atlanta, Georgia that partners with the nation’s most prestigious hospitals and health systems. HCPA’s areas of expertise include revenue cycle management, information systems, business intelligence, and clinical and operations performance excellence.

HCPA uses Alteryx to enhance data-driven consulting engagements for several hospital and health system clients. Lauren Gess, a Director at HCPA, says that Alteryx bolsters and allows for more detailed data analysis prepared for clients. A prime example is the assistance provided to health systems in mitigating adverse financial consequences during electronic health record (EHR) implementations. EHRs are designed to maintain patient health records, streamline administrative tasks like scheduling and billing, and maintain accuracy and patient safety. Implementing an EHR is a vast undertaking and can often leave health systems with significant financial issues if not managed properly.

HCPA uses Alteryx for revenue monitoring before and after implementation, assisting health systems in understanding the effects of changes on revenue and offering insights necessary for accurate revenue capture. Recently, a $2.5 billion health system in the Southeast undergoing an Epic EHR conversion sought HCPA’s help for go-live revenue monitoring.

Client Example: Go-Live Revenue Monitoring

Revenue volatility, annual pricing adjustments, natural disasters, and the volume of historical data make establishing a performance baseline extremely difficult without tools like Alteryx. “COVID severely impacted the integrity of the data we had to work with, so we had get creative and use extended historical data, build complex models and test and evaluate the results to accurately forecast revenue,” said Derik Sadowski, Senior Consultant at HCPA.

To appropriately baseline and assess revenue, HCPA knew Alteryx was the tool they needed: Alteryx can analyze historical revenue, generate baselines to measure conversion performance, and identify issues in real time. “Alteryx brought consistency to the process and additional quality assurance. Being able to resolve data problems and get our heads wrapped around what was happening with the data was much easier with Alteryx,” Lauren Gess said.

Using Designer, HCPA cleansed data from various sources, normalized pricing changes over the four-year timeframe, and evaluated impacts to revenue such as growth, seasonality and COVID. In addition, Designer’s fuzzy matching capabilities were crucial in matching mis-mapped revenue across the health system.

The real game-changer was the ability to combine Alteryx with other business intelligence tools for a seamless end-to-end process. HCPA used Snowflake, Alteryx and Tableau to drive real-time insights for its client. “While Alteryx was critical for analysis, the integration Snowflake, Alteryx, and Tableau made this project successful,” Derik said. Using Snowflake, the team created a single source of truth that made datasets more standardized and accessible. Tableau was key to the revenue monitoring project because visualizations helped the client see the comparisons between the baseline and current performance in real time, allowing for corrective action to mitigate adverse financial impact.

In addition to numerous insights provided by the go-live revenue monitoring tools, HCPA was able to quickly detect $60M in missing revenue. This enabled the client to promptly address the identified issues and accelerate revenue capture, mitigating significant downstream financial consequences. HCPA’s expertise in revenue cycle management, combined with the flexibility and enhanced analytical capabilities of Alteryx, allowed them to uncover the discrepancies quickly and drive resolution.

Adaptable Analytics Infrastructure for Different Client Needs

Because HCPA is a consulting firm with a variety of clients, it needs to adapt its data infrastructure to different working styles and preferences for consuming data. Lauren pointed out that Snowflake and Alteryx make it easy to serve data in different ways, whether using Tableau or other tools. “We run into all sorts of different ways clients want to see data, and having Alteryx and Snowflake allows us to be flexible and creative on what we deliver at the end of the day,” Lauren said. With a flexible analytics infrastructure, HCPA can see around those corners and help its clients navigate changes efficiently.