Abax Health – Kevin Sleeper – Chief Growth Officer

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Increasing “Same Store Sales”

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As we are in the middle of, what for many, is a challenging 2024 financial year, healthcare leaders have undoubtedly been thinking about how to create a brighter financial 2025. Some of those considerations include choosing the right revenue improvement and health equity focused patient care and satisfaction initiatives.

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Traditionally, healthcare leaders have viewed improving their ability to offer better care through a cost cutting lens. Time and time again, we have heard healthcare leader’s state: “If we can just get our vendors to reduce their fees by 10%,” or “if we can better leverage automation, our current staff can become more efficient” we can cut our way to better financial performance.

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While this mindset is an important part of a thoughtful financial plan, we would like to offer an alternative.

 

Rather than looking to cut your way to financial stability, why not use the data you already have to increase patient volume and revenue?

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Think about it. In other industries, such as Burger King or Best Buy, they also look at cutting costs as a part of their financial planning. But where they spend most of their time thinking about is how to “increase same store sales.” If Burger King wants to sell more hamburgers, they leverage their customer’s purchasing data (e.g., what hamburgers sell best, why, and at what times) and create a new hamburger that more people want to purchase. They “increase same store sales” by leveraging the data that they already have to improve their financial top and bottom lines.

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Healthcare leaders can do the exact same thing. By leveraging the referral data that is sitting on their “clinical books,” meaning, by using AI to identify patients who have had a referral from their doctor for a procedure that they need, but have not yet been seen, healthcare leaders can also increase their “same store sales.”

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Once they have mined all these new “same store sales” opportunities for clinical care, they can further leverage that data and deploy an automated patient outreach campaign (whether through text, phone, email, or old-fashioned mailers), to connect with their patients, explain the referral their doctor prescribed for them, and conduct all of the administrative services needed for that patient to get the care they need. The patient gets critical care and the healthcare provider gets the revenue / increased same store sales.

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Healthcare leaders are passionate, mission driven individuals who are looking to provide the best care possible to as many patients as possible. By leveraging AI to uncover those patients who need care, but haven’t received it, they too can “increase same store sales” and fulfill that mission.

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We would say that that’s a pretty good way to start 2025.