How One Therapy Provider Lowered Costs and Transformed Decision Making with Business Intelligence

What’s a therapy provider to do when it is faced with a changing reimbursement landscape, and is plagued with challenges that hamper productivity?

It turns to business intelligence tools, of course.

Such was the case for Portland, Oregon-based Consonus Healthcare, a provider of consulting, rehabilitation, pharmacy and post-acute care in more than 80 rehab contracts across 11 states.

Informed Decisions

After developing an in-house analytics tool, Consonus considered hiring a team of full-time analysts to manage 
and mine their data. The company was preparing for the onset of value-based payments and was faced with the challenge of realizing its true cost-per-minute to remain competitive.

But data analysts don’t come cheap.

Jonalyn Brown, regional vice president of operations, knew that navigating the changing payment model was key to their success. Aligning pricing with their clients’ revenue structure required the ability to analyze cost by different metrics, like patient, payer and diagnosis.

After viewing a demo of Optima’s Business Intelligence tool, however, Brown was sold.

The offering allowed the company to establish dashboards that can help the team make informed decisions in real time, as well as identify the issue at hand: “What is our cost per minute?”

Since implementation, Brown and her team have built their own custom dashboards using the BI tool—helping to fuel decisions and leading to lower costs and improved outcomes.

 Improved productivity

In addition to using Optima’s BI tool, Consonus has been an Optima Therapy customer since 2007. The solution has also helped the company streamline their overall productivity—a driving factor for many agencies in controlling costs.

“Productivity is part of the day-to-day life in the rehab industry,” Guy Cowart, vice president of rehab operations says. “In 2007, we were only at about 75% productivity, and we knew we couldn’t sustain at 75%.”

Since implementation of Optima’s platform, Cowart explained that the team’s productivity is now at 80%, “month in, and month out.”

To learn more about how Consonus boosted its business operations with Optima, view the full video case study featuring several of the company’s leadership team, and read the case study about Consonus’ use of Optima’s BI tool.