[Encore] How data‑savvy strategic planners will define the next era of health system growth

Speaker A: Hey, radio Advisory listeners. Over the next three weeks, we're going to be revisiting some of our most important, most popular and most impactful conversations over the last few months. Maybe these are episodes that you missed, or maybe they're ones that we just really believe you need to hear a second time. Conversations around the changing role of the strategic planner, conversations about the state of pediatrics, and an update on how health systems are tackling health equity. In a time where there is so much more scrutiny over the precise language that we use, we're going to kick things off by revisiting our conversation on the changing role of the strategic planner. Because it used to be that health system strategic planners could come up with one plan for the coming year. Those days are over. But if we're going to be more flexible, we need the data to back it up. So in this conversation we're going to talk about why that's important and how you can actually do it. Let's take it away from Advisory Board. We are bringing you a radio Advisory, your weekly download on how to untangle healthcare's most pressing challenges. My name is Rachel Woods. You can call me Ray. On the surface, the role of the strategic planner within health systems hasn't changed much in the last decade. But of course, the operating environment has. Think about it. Planners are managing tighter budgets. They have more data options, there are more policy pressures, all of which require strategy leaders to move quickly and sometimes react defensively. But it can't all be defense. We know that health systems are actively pursuing growth. And to achieve those growth goals, strategy leaders need to understand what level of granularity is required in their analyses and their evaluations. So in today's conversation, I've invited two advisory board experts. We've got Sebastian Beckman, who leads quantitative research, and Ellie Wiles, our resident service line expert. Together they'll help us understand how the role of the strategic planner is changing and share an update on Advisory Board's new market intelligence product built on all payer claims. Hey, Sebastian. Hey, Ellie. Welcome back to Radio Advisory.

Speaker B: Hey, thanks for having us.

Speaker A: Thank you. Are you familiar with this social media trend that's happening right now that's all about going back to the year 2016? Have you seen this?

Speaker C: I'm extremely not online, so no.

Speaker B: Yeah, I thought it was 2016.

Speaker A: Perhaps this reveals that I'm extremely too online. So the trend is that style and things like that go in these kind of decade long cycles. So all these folks online are comparing 2026 to 2016. What was the fashion like, what was the makeup? Like, I'm going to take us to what was the role of strategic planning like in 2016? Because my understanding is that the function of the strategic planner role at hospitals and health systems has remained basically the same for the last decade. Maybe you could even extend that timeline further back. But of course, the world that those planners are operating in is vastly different. My question is, what shifts have had the biggest impact in reshaping the role of the health system strategic planner?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think there are maybe three big things I would think about. The first is financial pressure. So your budget constraints that are going to affect your whole organization are going to make it harder for you as a health system strategic planner to justify the investments you need in order to make sure your organization is making the best decisions possible. Because, you know, if it's between a claims data set for you versus a clinical investment that's going to save lives, it's hard to justify that investment every time. The second is kind of an opposite effect, which is that data is more available than ever before. So there's more data sources, different kinds of data, often cheaper data than was available in 2016.

Speaker A: The way that you're, uh, describing this, Sebastian, makes me think that I should believe that both of those things are bad. Budget constraints are obviously a challenge, and a challenge that frankly, radio advisory listeners should be well aware are happening across the healthcare market. But more availability of data, that sounds like a good thing to me.

Speaker B: More availability kind of turns into data commodification. It means having the best data is not a competitive edge. So having a data set, uh, where you can see ambulatory share, that used to be a differentiator. Knowing where physician referrals are going, that used to be something that set you apart from other health systems and meant that you could compete just on the quality of your data alone. That's no longer possible.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's exactly right. These budget constraints and financial pressures are highlighting the need for more precise decision making in service line strategy as well.

Speaker B: And I think those two together also set up the third thing I was alluding to. So you need visibility into different sites of care because your growth opportunities are no longer limited to the hospital. Most health systems we talk to are trying to grow ambulatory settings. They're trying to grow their physician network and their outpatient capabilities. They're not as focused as they used to be on just inpatient volume as kind of one big success driver.

Speaker A: All of this means the role of the strategic planner needs to evolve. My question is how Strategic planning needs

Speaker C: to become more nimble, more frequent and proactive and more democratized to drive more precise growth for health systems.

Speaker B: Yeah. And what that means in practice is you can't get away with one annual plan per service line. You have to be responsive to tons of different opportunities. You need to make it possible for more people at, ah, your organization, beyond the strategic planning shop to be able to identify proactive growth opportunities.

Speaker A: And they're going to do that with this democratized data.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: And kind of put structure on it. You need to get good at data democratization. And on the flip side, you also need to get good at governance. So you need to give people access and you need to make sure that you have the QA and they share definitions to make sure everyone's using the data. Right.

Speaker A: Okay. This means that I have a very difficult job as host, which is to talk about two of, I'm, um, sure our audience's favorite topics, data and governance, and talk about it in a way that is effective and helpful for the market. Clearly, data is really, really essential to this conversation. And I think I'm starting to come around to why. If planners have to be more nimble, they need to be more precise in what the growth opportunities actually are. You can't have that more nimble approach without clear data governance and clear data cascades. Where I'm, uh, very unclear is how you actually do that.

Speaker B: Ray, can I commit a cardinal podcasting sin which is to describe a visualization?

Speaker A: Let's try it.

Speaker B: Okay, so I think about this in two dimensions. So I think about data democratization kind of as your Y axis. So at the far bottom, only a handful of people at your organization are even able to touch the data. It's gated behind code. They have to use SQL. They have to join together tables that most people are not familiar with. At the very top, there is an interactive system that anyone at your health system can access. And it's easy for them to just drag drop tables to get the reports they need. And, um, there's a world of options in between those two.

Speaker A: Okay, I'm with you.

Speaker B: The X axis I think of as your data quality. So on the far left, the most basic is something like, I see my claims data and nothing else. On the far right is I've got ambulatory visibility. I've got state discharge data for inpatient. I've got consumer data, I've got cell phone data to see people's actual locations and where they come to the hospital. I've got everything I need. My Temptation, as the quantitative insights person is to say everyone needs to be at the top. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's your classic consulting two by two is everybody needs the most access to the most sophisticated data.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's so easy. No it's not. It's actually really hard. And it's not right for everyone to be at the top.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker B: Because it's not just about how much can people access the data, it's also about are you able to make sure that everyone speaks the same language when they talk about investment opportunities? Do you have a system in place to make sure that when you count orthopedics, you're counting in the same way as you are in cardiac, which is actually not always super straightforward. Do you have a system in place to make sure that the people interacting with your data know what they're doing and are able to produce results that are meaningful to identify an opportunity at your health system? So it's a governance question and not everyone should be all the way up at the top at ah, full democratization.

Speaker A: It makes sense to me that not everyone at an organization should have complete unfettered access to all of the data. But I'm less clear on why we only all wouldn't want the most sophisticated data the far right of the x axis as you described.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think it would be great if we could all get there. But data costs money and you have to make trade offs on how much data is our organization realistically going to use versus how much are we willing to spend on this. So I think longitudinal patient data is awesome. It lets you see when patients get a disease, what's all the care they get beforehand, what's all the care they get afterwards? How much of that do we capture versus our competitors? Most organizations I talk to, even the ones who have access to that data, don't actually use it. M so is that worth it to invest in that extra capability if it's not something that you're realistically going to be able to adopt? Especially in the context of a constrained

Speaker A: budget, which by the way, the muscle that you need to flex to be able to manage trade offs should be quite familiar to the strategic planner because they are constantly managing trade offs and

Speaker B: I think it's both budget trade offs as well as capacity trade offs. So do I have budget to buy this? Do I have the time to use this and do I have the organizational capacity to invest in data governance and bring everyone on this journey together to move more to the top, more to the right?

Speaker A: So far in this conversation we've had a bias towards the planning office. Right. We've been talking about the health system strategic planner, but we also acknowledge the fact that doing one plan for the entire system is a thing of the past. Ellie, you're here to represent our service line research. What is the role of service line leaders in setting that growth agenda? Uh, knowing that we need to be more nimble and we need to be more specific to be actually able to capitalize on the growth targets that we have.

Speaker C: I mean, historically, service line leaders are told to lead with influence. They're told to bring their qualitative insights and their qualitative perspective into driving system wide strategy and driving the strategy forward for their service lines. And we see that they're accessing more of the data that in the past was pretty much just within the domain of the strategic planners.

Speaker A: So you're saying that the service line leader is higher on the Y axis that Sebastian was describing. They're using the data that they have access to.

Speaker C: They should be, but a lot of times they don't have the time or the training or the expertise on how to leverage the data that they're given. And they also aren't always clued in or don't have the access to the same data that planners use. So as we've been doing this service line growth research, we've talked to a bunch of service line leaders who were really proud of growth initiatives that they'd recently led, but they couldn't measure the impact of those initiatives because they didn't have the data to evaluate them. Another, uh, way that we see this manifest is in the level of granularity that we talked about earlier. So a lot of times they'll prioritize entire service lines as areas for investment rather than finding a comparative advantage or a niche in their market where they can invest in a specific subspecialty or service.

Speaker B: Yeah, I see that manifesting is a, uh, reactive planning approach as well. So service line leaders reacting to what physicians are bringing them, not necessarily proactively evaluating in the data what are the opportunities in their market. It's, hey, my doctors say they want to do tavr. Let's evaluate that opportunity rather than looking across cardiac services and all the markets and all the potential services they could be investing in to understand which one has the greatest opportunity for growth for their organization.

Speaker C: And this leads to a pretty big gap in data guided strategy where decision making is driven by qualitative inputs and the quantitative pieces they have are sometimes the wrong ones or not the full picture.

Speaker B: So ideally, you would want it, uh, to look like service line leaders have the data they need and they're proactively looking for opportunity. And, you know, I kind of trash talk service leaders a little bit implicitly and earlier. And to use a counter example, I talked to a health system a little while ago who lock their data down so tight that their service area definitions are a secret. Uh, they won't tell anyone within their organization what their service area definitions are,

Speaker A: including the service line leaders.

Speaker B: Right. So service line leaders don't know what their hospital service area definition is. And the reason the planning shop has done this is they don't trust anyone else to bring meaningful analyses. Right. You need to be able to bring everyone along to share that responsibility across the organization, which is then a data governance question and an education question.

Speaker A: We'll be right back with more radio Advisory after this short break. Mhm.

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Speaker A: You're listening to radio Advisory. I'm Ray Woods. There's two things I'm taking from this conversation so far. First, this is a really, really hard environment to be planning your growth agenda in, especially when you have to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. And every organization is going to do that in a different way, different levels of data democratization based on different levels of sophistication. Ellie, I'm curious if you have an example that goes a bit counter to the one that Sebastian just said. He just shared an example of service line leaders being entirely locked out of the data and therefore the planning. Is there an example where organizations and service line leaders are doing this well, when they're actually harnessing the data at the right level?

Speaker C: Yeah, there's one that comes to mind. Memorial Health System spent the last couple of years building out basically service line dashboards at the level of even, like subspecialties. And they have set it up in such a way that not only does the data and strategy team that manages this platform can access it, but also the service line leaders, the physicians, anybody within the organization can request access to the platform. The data pools are automatic. So they can, um, go in there and find the stat that they're looking for, get it immediately, with the caveat that they Then take it back to the team to make sure that they're interpreting it correctly before they take it to, let's say, the C suite to make a proposal for some investment.

Speaker A: So, Sebastian, where would you put Memorial on your graph?

Speaker B: Yeah, I'd put them, um, towards the right and towards the top. Maybe like halfway to the top.

Speaker A: So pretty sophisticated in terms of the data.

Speaker B: And everyone who needs access can request access. And there's a training and onboarding process for them to make sure they're using the data appropriately.

Speaker A: And what has the accessibility to that sophisticated data gotten Memorial?

Speaker C: They have significantly reduced the time needed to gather data for decision making, literally from weeks to minutes. They have brought in more decision makers and basically fostered this environment where they're pulling in input from across the system, rather than just from their isolated strategy team. They've been able to pinpoint specific procedures and subspecialties that have higher contribution margin so they can make those more precise growth decisions as well.

Speaker A: And that's exactly the level that we're pushing our health system partners to get to when it comes to their growth agenda. We already said gone are the years of the annual strategic plan, but I'm not sure it's even. We have to think about service line level growth at the service line level. What you're describing is contribution margin at the procedure level.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. The population in South Florida is growing anyways, so it's hard to kind of isolate their results from that. But they have seen growth on the magnitude of 20 to 40% in volume growth and in revenue growth across service lines, as well as their ancillary services like imaging and specialty pharmacy.

Speaker A: So, Ellie, that example is a really good one of why more granular data is helpful, to pursue more niche growth at the service line level and even at a level deeper. But the other thing I heard is really important for the role of strategic planning in 2026 is being nimble.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker A: Reacting quickly, assessing progress, making any pivots when you need to. Is there an organization that's taking this nimble approach to strategic planning and doing it effectively?

Speaker C: Yeah. So we're seeing that operational considerations are a big part, or at least should be a big part of strategic planning, making sure that you have the infrastructure and CAPAC to support new initiatives. One example that comes to mind is an AMC in the south who built out an analysis they call the Growth Opportunity Index, which assesses service lines and subservice lines to identify opportunities that have the right combination of volume and positive contribution margin. So not just looking to invest in the highest revenue service lines or subservice lines, but what has the highest contribution margin that there's also enough demand to support M. So one way that they use this, they were able to shift some of their negative margin services to other sites of care rather than growing them indiscriminately to kind of guide a site of care optimization initiative.

Speaker A: And that's really important because volume doesn't necessarily equal margin. Something that we've been tracking especially over the last couple of years, is this decoupling of volume and margin. So I like that this granular level allowed this particular organization to identify opportunities for growth, but it also allowed them to understand what do we need to deprioritize.

Speaker B: Can I add on one point there? So something that I love about both of those examples is they're both organizations that have really solid market data. So what is the external market doing? What's our market share? How much opportunity is there to chase? And really good internal data. So that's the margin and cost piece. Right. And you really do need both in order to make the best decisions.

Speaker A: Here's why I think our listeners are going to find this so hard though, is that even though both of those examples are great examples, it also sounds to me that the data capabilities that best serve your organization are the data capabilities that best serve your organization. Sebastian, thinking back to that matrix that you outlined for us earlier, this combination of sophistication on the x axis, democratization on the. Yeah. How should health systems be thinking about their data needs to best drive their growth moving forward?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think both of those examples having at least directionally correct margin data on the internal side is really important to make sure that you're identifying growth opportunities that are also going to result in margin growth. On the market data side. I think there's kind of a minimum level that everyone should be hitting now, which is you need full inpatient visibility and you need ambulatory visibility because that's where a lot of these growth opportunities are now.

Speaker A: And how do you get that?

Speaker B: There's about a half dozen vendors out there that offer roughly equivalent solutions. So they all describe about 80% of claims coverage nationally and they differentiate on things like longitudinal claims coverage on top of that all payer solution or maybe even really detailed physicial referral data intended for liaison offices. But like I said earlier, I don't think all health system strategic planners actually need all of those capabilities.

Speaker A: Yeah, I was just going to ask if there's a minimum threshold that you need is There a ceiling that you can kind of ignore above?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean for some people you probably do want everything right. For some organizations, if you can use the longitudinal data, you should be chasing after solutions there. But I think the minimum that everyone should be hitting is that ambulatory visibility.

Speaker A: Got it.

Speaker B: We just came out with advisory board Market Intelligence, which is our all payer claims data solution. I think of this as being that kind of 80, 20 market data solution that we talked about before. It does market size, market share, competition out migration, physician relationships, all with that visibility across sites of care, including crucially those ambulatory sites. The two things that make this different from other solutions out there. The first is value. So what I hear from our members is that they're paying at least 150k and often contracts that run into the millions for access to those types of data, we're coming in below that. The second is flexibility. So we've created a capability where you can drag and drop the fields you need for whatever analysis you're doing today, knowing that today you might be looking at joint replacement market size in the ambulatory surgery center, tomorrow you might be looking at who are the physicians driving cardiac cath volumes to facilities outside of our network. And you need to be able to quickly get the data you need for that particular analysis. And that's what we've optimized for. In addition to that, we're not constraining you geographically, so where most of the solutions I see will let you set up one geography, one service area and then kind of nickel and dime you as you try to expand beyond that or compare to different markets. We give you access to the whole country and then you can drill down to the specific markets you're interested in and need to analyze for the specific question you have. For more, reach out to your client services rep with advisory board. They'd be happy to schedule a calendly. Or you can actually use the calendly link in the show notes where you can schedule directly with one of our team to get a demo of the data.

Speaker A: Got it. It's impossible for me to have a conversation about data without acknowledging how artificial intelligence can maybe transform the utility of that. Ah, data. So those of you with your buzzword bingo card at home, go ahead and cross that box off. Have either of you seen planners or service line leaders effectively use AI to make data more usable, more accessible, more precise so that it can actually drive growth?

Speaker B: Not yet. I think this is early days for AI in this space.

Speaker A: So if not yet, what would it actually take to get to the point where AI can actually be an unlock here.

Speaker B: Part of it gets back to how is the data stored. And I don't want to get into a plumbing conversation here, but a lot of this is, you know, the way we store data is optimized for the HR or the billing system, not for humans. And your AI chatbot is really good at pulling out insights from semi structured data. But if it's locked away in five different tables that you have to merge anytime you want to count something, your AI is probably not the best solution. It's probably going to get a result if you're applying some kind of like agentic system here. But you will have no way of qaing that that is not just as time intensive as doing the work in the first place. So you get into some of those data engineering problems. I also think that there are a lot of concerns about privacy of the data governance, uh, where maybe you don't want to be giving this to take your pick of whichever vendor you can imagine. Right. So I think it is just still a little bit early for those kinds of solutions in this space.

Speaker C: We keep asking about AI in our service line leader conversations, but we've just gotten vague. Maybe it would be interesting for this, but nobody is really using it yet in service line strategic planning.

Speaker A: Yeah, I see a disconnect between what vendors or tech companies say is possible and what the leaders on the ground are effectively doing. And the good news that I'm hearing from this conversation is that there is a lot that service line leaders and strategic planners can do with the data that they have, especially as that data becomes more sophisticated and as more people hopefully get access to that data across their organization.

Speaker B: Yeah, I do think if we play forward a couple years, AI should be a helpful tool here. Right. So if you need more analyses, you need more nimble, you need more granular, you really need a way to increase your capacity to do these analyses. And um, AI feels like a solution there. That said, I think it compounds all the same data governance issues we've already talked about. Right. So how do you ensure quality and consistency with your colleagues? Well, this new colleague often hallucinates and is extremely confident about their work. So yeah, you should probably be exploring options here, but it's not going to obviate the need for the hard work of figuring out your governance and figuring out your education and making sure everyone is thinking about growth in the same way.

Speaker A: Well, when AI does eventually help us here, I am sure that you will be back on radio Advisory to tell us about it. Sebastian Ellie, thanks so much for coming on Radio Advisory.

Speaker B: M thank you.

Speaker C: Thanks Ray.

Speaker A: We got into a lot of detail in this conversation and I know we shared several examples. So allow me to bring you back to our key takeaway. Strategic planning needs to be more nimble and more granular. Here's what that means for you. Take advantage of the different data sets that are available to you and make sure you're democratizing access to that data, matching it with the qualitative perspective of UM, leaders at the service line level so that you can make better growth decisions for the future. Advisory Board will actually be launching an all payer claims solution later this year to help you with this exact challenge. If you're interested in learning more about that, reach out to your account manager or email us at podcast@advisory.com because remember, as always, we're here to help. Next week on Radio Advisory, the reason

Speaker B: why I think it's important to shed a light on pediatric organizations because the race that they're running is already started and they have to move pretty fast and have plans in place pretty quickly.

Speaker A: New episodes drop every Tuesday. If you like Radio Advisory, please share it with your networks, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a rating and a review. Radio Advisory is a production of Advisory Board. This episode was produced by me, Ray woods, as well as Abby Burns, Chloe Baxt, and Atticus Rauch. The episode was edited by Katie Anderson with technical support provided by Dan Tayag, Chris Phelps, and Joe Schrumm. Additional support was provided by Leanne Elston and Aaron Collins. We'll see you next week,

Speaker B: Ray. First of all, I'm awestruck by that transition. I had no idea where that was going.

Speaker A: I admittedly planned this five minutes ago.