The Advisory Board Company: Working Council for Health Plan Executives

Working Council for Health Plan Executives

The mission of the Working Council for Health Plan Executives, our program for health plans and insurers, is to unlock the value of our research—largely in the hospital and health system sector—for payers. Without presuming detailed knowledge of regional insurance markets, the Working Council aims to provide plan executives with a deeper understanding of the forces in health care delivery driving industry-wide change, growth, and demand.

Sample of Recent Research

Innovation and the Outmigration of Care: Future Growth, Competition, and Outpatient Shift in Hospital Procedural Lines

Aimed at a hospital audience, this study discusses major technological and economic drivers of care site shifts, with focus on which services are likely to remain in the hospital versus moving to alternate care sites across the next decade.

  • Future procedure volumes by hospital service line
  • Future inpatient-to-outpatient shift of key hospital surgeries
  • Suggested future hospital strategy in a changing site-of-care landscape

Elevating Performance on Reported Metrics: Best Practices for Responding to Increased Transparency in Hospital Quality

As transparency increases and reimbursement is linked ever more closely to clinical quality and efficiency, hospitals have struggled to correctly prioritize—and perform well against—a large number of metrics, methodologies, and intervals of reporting. This study profiles hospital best practices for focusing performance improvement on the most urgent areas, excelling on reported metrics, and responding to scrutiny from payers, regulators, and the public.

  • Tactics to raise metric awareness (and compliance) among physicians
  • Improving documentation to better capture performance data
  • Embedding proven best practices into hospital care

Creating an Innovation Infrastructure: Ensuring Appropriate Introduction of New Technologies and Therapies

Hospitals nationwide face issues of cutting-edge equipment straining limited capital budgets, while novel and “me too” drugs and devices pressure already thin margins. This publication profiles hospitals and health systems that have found ways to manage innovation tightly, with positive effect on both clinical quality and economics.

  • Improving technology intelligence at the hospital level
  • Creating a 360-degree assessment process for emerging clinical technologies
  • Ensuring principled rollouts of clinical innovations

Sample Tools and Resources for Members

Outpatient Market Forecaster

  • 6,000+ individual procedure-level forecasts for market growth, non-hospital competition, revenue changes, cost trends
  • Five- and ten-year forecast options, zip-code-level specificity

Service Line Briefings

Current market landscape, forecasts of future demand and economics, and strategic imperatives for principal hospital service lines, including:

  • Future of Cardiac Services
  • Future of Cardiology
  • Future of Orthopedic Surgery
  • Future of Neurosciences
  • Future of Diagnostic Imaging
  • Future of Oncology
  • Future of Women’s Services