The world of provider compensation is complicated—and data is everything. The new generation of compensation technology is helping leaders learn more from their data and make more informed staffing and compensation decisions than they ever could before.
So what’s new inside the latest compensation technology? For one thing, we’ve moved past fragile, cumbersome spreadsheets and systems with a million different menu items but few guideposts for what to do with your information. The latest tools make data about compensation more accessible, manageable, and secure, and provide business insights about staffing and compensation. New tools also offer more transparency about compensation for everyone—administrators and providers alike—which helps build trust between health systems and their providers.
If you’ve been on the fence about updating your compensation technology—because of cost or because change can be overwhelming—here are three thoughts on why now’s the time.
1. Managing disparate systems is exhausting and error prone
When I talk with compensation teams, they tell me that one of their biggest challenges is having data spread across so many systems—contracts, EMR, EHR, payroll, GL scheduling…. Working with data that’s all over the place makes it almost impossible to get different departments on the same page, and to see the big picture of contracts and spending.
A closely related problem is the spreadsheets—I hear A LOT about the spreadsheets. For teams still trying to balance everything in Excel, the complexity is overwhelming. They spend countless hours juggling between sheets (and waiting when they crash). The approach is prone to errors, and it’s a huge challenge to know whether you’ve got the most up-to-date data when you’re making major spending decisions.
When the health systems I work with finally make the leap to integrating all of their data into one unified workforce intelligence platform, they are delighted to find out how much easier it is to work—and plan—with a single, updated source of truth for everything about compensation.
With updated compensation tools, the team at CHRISTUS Healthcare Systems set aside time-consuming and error-prone Excel spreadsheets and gained more time for strategizing. And they were able to build stronger relationships with their providers.
2. When your data’s unwieldy, it’s hard to build trust with your providers
Providers want to understand their compensation and see how they compare with their peers. But at many health systems, providers are wading through raw EMR and EHR data for details, and often the data they find isn’t perfectly in sync with the comp they receive. Health systems struggle to compile and explain everything to their providers each month, and it’s still not always clear. When every paycheck is a question mark, it’s hard to build trust.
So another enormous benefit of unified, modernized compensation tech is that you can let providers check a single source of truth to understand their compensation and see that it’s being processed correctly based on their own unique contracts. This transparency leads to happier providers, and less turnover.
3. Change can be overwhelming, but leaders can help
When we begin working with a new client, sometimes they’re worried about opening up their data. They know there may be errors, and they see that the system is crumbling under its weight. If your staff is feeling that way, that’s a huge indicator that an upgrade is overdue.
But changing the way an organization does things can be uncomfortable. It helps for leaders to set the tone. Let your teams know that new tools are all about making them more effective at the very important work they do.
A final thought
Still trying to decide? I’ll leave you with this thought: one of the best ways to improve a system is to measure and track it. And that’s something you can’t do if your data is trapped in disparate and unwieldy places. Especially now, as health systems face tremendous external pressure to manage expenses, the right technology can help you manage costs, retain providers, and position yourself to scale—and thrive—in the future.
By, Dimitry Plotko
Dimitry Plotko is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Hallmark and the former Senior Vice President of Product Development at ADT. With over 30 years of experience leading innovative technology organizations, Plotko has built deep expertise in the ways tech can help compensation leaders understand their markets, manage their data, keep on top of security and compliance, and strengthen relationships with their employees.
Want to know more about Hallmark’s healthcare-native workforce enablement and intelligence platform? Reach out for a demo: https://hallmarkhcs.com/.