Giving Compass' Take:

Bianca A. Briola, writing for HealthLeaders Media, discusses how health systems need an entire transformation that focuses on managing organizational finances.

How can donors play a role in helping drive progress with advancing health systems?

Read these insights on effective health financing.


Today, health systems are trapped in a financial pincer: fixed costs for drugs, labor and patient care expenses continue to rise as the population ages and develops more acute ailments, while reimbursements from public and private payers get smaller.

To weather this reality, organizations need to be much more deliberate in deploying strategies that maximize all potential sources of new and existing revenue, while jettisoning activities that are not generating added value. Creating a broad-based approach to managing organizational finances in this way often requires a system-wide transformation.

  • Move beyond cutting costs: Health systems need to transform their cost structures and create new revenue lines to effectively support the transition to new payment and care delivery models.
  • Use data to ask and answer questions across the continuum: Successful and sustainable performance improvement work cannot be standalone or accomplished in siloes. Enterprise-wide transformation requires integrated business intelligence that illuminates directional opportunities and potential interdependencies across practices in the workforce, supply chain, care delivery and more.
  • Establish a strong foundational infrastructure: Improvement and decision-making infrastructures must be strong enough to effectively enable action, facilitate timely communication, and serve as a venue to manage interdependencies and challenges.

Read the full article about systemwide transformations by Bianca A. Briola HealthLeaders Media