CORUS Suite

The Clinical Operations Resources Utilization System (CORUS™) Suite leverages Health Catalyst’s DOS™ platform and best-of-breed, activity-based costing models to deliver accurate and actionable data. CORUS helps users manage the true cost of care across the continuum—information critical to succeeding in the new reimbursement world. Health Catalyst’s first of its kind data quality, validation, and automation makes this type of costing a reality in healthcare.

The CORUS Suite leverages the Data Operating System (DOS) so healthcare systems can dig deep into the true cost of providing care across the continuum and relate those costs to patient outcomes.

The problem

Chief financial officers (CFOs) and healthcare leaders are struggling to navigate a perfect financial storm: lower inpatient volumes, increased patient bad debt, and continued uncertainty around the momentum of payment reform. Old approaches to healthcare cost management are wholly inadequate for competing in the new reimbursement landscape. Relying on outdated technology and antiquated costing methodologies, traditional systems don’t provide the insight leaders need to manage costs or improve quality.

The health organizations that succeed amid this turmoil will be those who understand their costs, their clinical outcomes, and how to maximize the healthcare value equation. Unfortunately, healthcare leaders today lack insight into the true cost of the services they provide and their impact on health outcomes. Outdated processes and technologies for managing cost end up leaving them in the dark when it comes to lowering expenses, reducing variation, or negotiating favorable at-risk contracts with payers.

Our approach

Health Catalyst has partnered with industry-leading health systems to develop a next-generation costing system: the CORUS Suite. For the first time, CFOs, physicians, service line leaders, and clinical and financial analysts can dig deep into the true cost of providing care across the continuum and relate those costs to patient outcomes.

Benefits and features

• View the true cost of patient care – Integration of patient-level EHR data and departmental and equipment resource-utilization data enables true cost of patient care.
• Free analysts to focus on identifying variation and cost-saving opportunities – Manufacturing-style activity-based costing with robust data quality and cost validation algorithms are scalable and maintainable.
• Accelerate cost-management transformation – CORUS includes embedded costing knowledge, including best practices, rules, and algorithms from world-renowned academic healthcare institutions.
• Make timely, data-driven decisions – Built on the Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS™), healthcare’s most advanced analytics platform, CORUS supports more than 160 source systems, including EHRs, claims, general ledger, payroll, supply chain, and patient satisfaction systems.

Use cases

• A health system has acquired a new hospital and the cost accounting team has been asked to generate cost data for this new facility. The team can quickly configure and validate the data for the new team and run the analysis to have this facility included in the costing process in a matter of days instead of months. This gives the health system early and actionable insights into the operations of their acquisition.
• A health system had been using charges as the basis of costing for the operating room. Knowing the organization now has the CORUS Suite, the operating room (OR) director wants to find out her true costs; she asks Finance to look at the integrated clinical and cost data to find the specific times and all personnel resources used in the OR during surgeries. Finance is able to use precise times and resources from the CORUS data to easily identify the true labor costs, and look at costs for supplies by linking directly to Supply Chain data sources in the CORUS Suite. Finance compares costs for each surgeon, and displays the data showing labor and supplies. One discovery is that the physician with the shortest time was using additional staff. Finance shares this information with clinical teams, who can then compare time, resource costs, and clinical outcomes to determine best practice and reduce clinical variation.