By: Allison McCarthy, MBA | amccarthy@barlowmccarthy.com
Some of the most valuable work in healthcare does not show up as direct revenue. That does not mean there isn’t a case to be made for it.
In my coaching with healthcare leaders, I often see that the people who get the “yes” are the ones who know how to show ROI where leadership may not be looking.
When I talk about ROI, I mean four things:
- Dollars: The direct revenue everyone already counts.
- Downstream: The referrals, imaging, labs, procedures, and other services one area feeds into across the organization.
- People: The staff time you can free up or redirect when you improve a broken process.
- Energy: The organizational capacity you protect by solving small problems before they become big ones.
I once coached a Chief of Endocrinology who wanted to make the case for expanding his diabetes program. His vision was to add a diabetes nurse practitioner and nutrition services, allowing those team members to manage appropriate aspects of ongoing diabetes care while he focused his time on the most clinically complex patients.
There was one problem: as a stand-alone program, the additional revenue didn’t cover the cost of the investment.
If the financial analysis stopped there, the answer was likely to be “no.”
But diabetes doesn’t exist in a silo.
Patients with diabetes often require care for cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, vascular complications, and other related conditions. Expanding the population of patients receiving diabetes care could also create significant downstream value for cardiology, nephrology, vascular services, imaging, laboratory services, and other areas of the health system.
The opportunity was there. But recognizing it wasn’t enough. He needed to prove it.
That meant looking beyond the endocrinology P&L and into the clinical information system. Could we identify a cohort of existing diabetes patients, follow where they were referred for additional care, determine how much of that care stayed within the health system, and quantify the revenue those services generated?
Answering those questions required more than clinical expertise.
It required the leader to understand what data was available in the EMR, know what questions to ask of that data, and have enough influence across the organization to gain the support of analytics, finance, IT, and other partners needed to extract and interpret it.
That is an important leadership skill that can be easy to overlook.
You don’t necessarily need to know how to run the report yourself. But you do need to know that the data exists, understand what you need it to tell you, and build the relationships necessary to get access to it.
With that information, the question changes.
Instead of asking:
“Will the endocrinology program pay for itself?”
Leadership can ask:
“What is the total value to the health system if this investment allows us to serve and retain a larger population of patients with diabetes?”
That is the opportunity.
When you frame your work as more than its individual revenue line—and bring the data to demonstrate that value—you give leadership a reason to care that they may not have considered.
Before your next pitch, ask yourself:
What is the full return on this idea?
What data would help me prove it?
And whose support do I need to get that data and turn it into a compelling business case?
The ROI may already be there. The leadership challenge is knowing how to uncover it.
Where is the ROI in your area that leadership isn’t measuring?
Ready to partner with a coach that will help you think more strategically? I have been coaching healthcare leaders on these topics for many years and would love to work with you, too. Send me a note at info@barlowmccarthy.com and we can find a time to talk.