Key Pharmacy Indicators for a Health System's Financial Performance

Girish Dighe, PharmD, MS, discusses what to look for when evaluating a health system's financial performance, and pharmacy's role in it. This video was filmed at the ASHP (American Society of Health-System Pharmacists) 54th Midyear Clinical Meeting & Exhibition in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Girish Dighe, PharmD, MS: Pharmacy plays a significant piece in the financial portfolio of any organization today. When you think of your high-cost infusion meds, we need to really make sure that we have a revenue integrity program that’s solid. So when we think of some of the things as far as metrics are concerned, we look at infusion denials, we look at that as a percentage of our gross revenue, and we look at also net revenue. It’s very important that we don’t just talk in terms of gross revenue, but what’s our overall net revenue impact. Charge reconciliation programs is key, also, to our net revenue integrity program, so when you think of charge reconciliation we’re looking at also charge capture opportunities. We’re looking at also charge lag, to make sure that we are reducing our AR—our accounts receivable days—which is an essential financial metric for revenue cycle and our finance stakeholders. Overall, I think we also need to make sure that we have the right gross revenue metrics in place, and that we’re reporting that on a certain cadence with our department leads. As we balance out, again, the clinical initiatives that we have, and understanding how that impacts our financial performance, it’s very important that we do a proper dashboard or scorecard so that we’re working with our clinical and department stakeholders on how our financial performance is looking.