HANDLE has worked with health systems across the US to put together 5 tips to help make a capital stakeholders’ budgeting season a bit easier this year.
How to effectively manage your upcoming Budgeting Cycle:
For many healthcare systems, it’s budgeting season! These last few months of the calendar year are busy. Often filled with ambiguity, dozens of meetings, hundreds of spreadsheets… all while managing your day job. HANDLE has worked with health systems across the US to put together 5 tips to help make a capital stakeholders’ budgeting season a bit easier this year.
Make sure you’re looking at the right data:
How many different ways is your organization entering the same model number or manufacturer in various systems? On top of data cleanliness, how accurate is your active asset list in your CMMS system?
Having a healthy starting dataset will help you avoid downstream problems like:
Weigh ALL of your budget allocation options
Health systems are complex; managing risk across multiple facilities or service lines, optimizing revenue opportunities, and balancing strategic investment with day-to-day operations are all accompanied by a unique set of questions, risks, and rewards.
It is essential to validate budgeted dollar allocations based on data, not political alignment or other non-tangible factors.
Building a holistic view into your fleet’s health by service line and facility will allow you to strategically budget dollars without the headache.
Replace the right asset, at the right location, at the right time, and for the right price
After you’ve allocated your budget dollars, now comes the fun part, selecting your assets for replacement. We have found that hospitals typically have service line or facility leaders submit assets for replacement or new capital requests. However, unless Tip 1, “Make sure you’re looking at the right data” is enabled, these capital leaders are left to make decisions based on poor data.
Having an accurate view of typical asset life spans vs. actual service life, risks associated with an asset, and standardization initiatives will provide capital leaders with the insights they need to make the best decision for your health system.
Effectively Manage New Capital Requests
100% of the hospital systems we’ve worked with have utilized spreadsheets as a format for submitting capital requests. Utilizing non-templated documents for managing capital requests creates the risk of inaccurately submitted data and lack of completeness (i.e. considering costs related to IT, Construction, etc.), which then results in more meetings and ambiguity in the budgeting cycle.
Having a standardized form, in a cloud-based system, will guarantee compliance in the submission of capital requests and enable capital committee members to review requests in bulk, rather than managing a shared drive with thousands of documents and attachments.
Align Stakeholders Throughout The Year
We have seen the management of a capital asset’s lifecycle in up to 7 different systems inside a single health system. That’s why it’s important to have one source of truth that provides all capital stakeholders with a real-time view of the assets in their fleet, prioritization of replacement and new assets for their annual budget, and aggregated data from each point solution a hospital system might utilize.
HANDLE’s CCM® platform is the first ever end-to-end capital management system and helps your hospital implement all five of these tips and more! Starting with our industry-leading data cleansing and enhancement services, CCM® provides you with the insights and workflows required for you to enforce organizational standards, make data-driven decisions, and align capital stakeholders across your hospital system.
If you’re ready to get a HANDLE on this year’s budgeting cycle, contact us to learn how!