Accumen
Improving Healthcare by Reducing Waste

“Healthcare, like government and education, is a smart frontier, but our decisions do not reflect this fact. Over time, bureaucracy, mediocrity, and a lack of performance mindset have crept into this sector, creating an environment that makes us more inclined to stay stagnant than take a risk to move forward,” says Jeff Osborne, President and CEO of Accumen. Osborne realizes that healthcare differs from other industrial sectors with its single-minded focus on patient welfare but refuses to let that stand in the path of undertaking operational risks to enhance its functioning. The formation of Accumen stemmed from the realization that the delivery of quality healthcare should not be at the cost of a lagging performance curve. The company addresses the wastage or injudicious usage of medical facilities and equipment in healthcare delivery and aims to provide a proof-of-concept for its improvement. “We intend to lead the way in making healthcare more cost-effective without compromising on patient care and the quality of service,” says Osborne.

Accumen takes a comprehensive approach to delivering strategic processes and innovative technologies for optimizing and modernizing laboratories, ensuring their relevance amidst the changing dynamics of the healthcare industry. With seven years of experience in the healthcare industry, Accumen has over one billion dollars in clinical laboratory spend under management. The company’s performance-based mindset helps in setting standards for its customers by evaluating evidence-based data to help improve their operations’ performance. “The secret of our success lies in introducing people from performance-driven industrial sectors to work in combination with the healthcare industry experts,” explains Osborne. Accumen proffers change management and cutting-edge lab solutions to its clients and guides them through the execution process in the journey of self-transformation. Accumen helps their partners’ take their clinical labs ‘from good to great,’ by working a l o n g s i d e the partners through the duration of their partnership to drive the results of the transformation while providing realistic performance benchmarks.

Accumen’s approach to reducing waste started with identifying the untapped opportunity within the hospital and health system, the clinical laboratory.

We intend to lead the way in making healthcare more cost-effective without compromising on patient care and quality of service

The clinical lab comprises of 3-5 percent of the overall health system expenses, thus it usually has been viewed as a cost center rather than a profit center in the healthcare sector. However, saving costs aids in making a major impact on health system profitability by up to 20 percent. Additionally, Accumen has also aided their Midwestern client patient blood management to reduce unnecessary transfusions by 40 percent over a period of two and a half years. After clients achieved sustainable results with Accumen in laboratories and imaging, they are now propelling their services to become a diagnostics management performance company, by integrating pharma into their list of solutions.

Accumen’s experienced team is comprised of people from various industrial sectors to optimize client performance, has built a robust technology performance platform, the Accumen Performance Suite™. The technology suite does not replace the client’s EMR, lab information systems and the like, but monitors them and through aggregated data feeds. The company uses this data for carrying out performance analytics, including lab testing, performance volumes, blood management, and the cost of labor and supply. The Accumen Performance Suite™ is used to convert aggregated data into real-time actionable insights which then Accumen’s partners in the clinical lab and imaging sectors to review their performance on a regular basis.

The Accumen technology roadmap includes several enhancements in the coming years. This includes a glance at the advantages of data analytics as well as a shift from performance analytics to advanced predictive analytics to refine the planning and execution of expensive assets. A simulation-based design to enable working on visual models before implementing real-life changes has also been planned.