Valhalla’s role for clients is to provide advice, execution, and advocacy. We help clients reduce cost, manage risk, improve employee engagement, and enable more focus on strategic matters for our contacts in HR and finance. Data is an important input to advice.
As a boutique firm, Valhalla ingests and supports numerous data solutions. These solutions help clients to accomplish various objectives:
- Benchmark against other employers: costs and benefits
- Evaluate performance of financial measures: including implications to future periods
- Evaluate performance of clinical drivers: including identification of care gaps
- Support strategic decisions based on cost drivers: including hospital costs
The principals at Valhalla are supported by strategic partnerships and platform relationships which enable each of these items based on client-specific needs. This blogpost will share a few categories of such support.
The systematic approach to data analytics brought by Valhalla Business Advisors to mid-market clients is unprecedented in the marketplace. Valhalla’s approach enables monthly updates and actuarial insights competing brokers have, heretofore, never implemented at scale.
Bespoke Transparency analysis
Jens wrote a blogpost on March 23, 2021 about the implications of various transparency rules impacting hospitals, as well as some research and reporting on implementation of these regs, which were posted via CMS on July 29, 2019. Here is the blogpost and here is the posting by CMS.
Valhalla can support client-specific requests with custom analysis of publicly available machine-readable reports from hospitals to draw insight. Questions posed by clients about “how do costs compare across providers” or “how do allowed amounts vary within a single provider” can now be evaluated by virtue of hospital-provided data.
Sage Transparency
Jens wrote a personal blogpost on May 7, 2022 about the launch of Sage Transparency and the role of advisors to help health plan sponsors. Check it out here. In the meantime, Sage continues to improve its platform. Valhalla uses this platform to supplement other sources of data in areas of hospital cost and quality.
Blue raven actuarial xp
Valhalla is quite enthusiastic about a solutions platform developed by colleague and friend Nick Allen. This solution is primarily financial in nature and offers Valhalla clients a unique platform on which to collaborate regarding past claims experience, solutions implemented, and future projections and planning.
The solutions listed above are not representative of all data solutions reviewed and considered by clients of Valhalla. Included in other solutions we have consulted over and can see “fit” for in the marketplace are Innovu, Cotiviti, and Springbuk, among others. [Of the list above, we are partial to Innovu, as a function of past diligence…] If you would like to discuss how Valhalla would incorporate analytics solutions and custom projects to support your business’ objectives, please reach out to either Stuart or Jens to discuss further!
Appendix || Added on October 18, 2023
Valhalla Business Advisors has continued to refine its capabilities to add value to clients through bespoke analytics. In recent presentations to various audiences, including CEO groups, task forces, and community groups, the following slide has been presented to demonstrate the scope and scale of the issues with managing this data, along with a simple example of the “so what” via a SQL query identifying the number of prices for a single payer (in this case, Highmark) for a single procedure (24,722 unique prices!)
This slide shares some examples of insights drawn from early data reviews utilizing a Jupyter Notebook for a specific provider in the Lehigh Valley: St Lukes. There is a rather consistent differential across these two networks, as well as between cash-pay relative to any available network!
The following exhibits were also created to share insights with a group about cost variation by network within providers, as well as across providers while holding networks constant.
Please let us know if discussing these models further would add value to you/your organization!