Strata Decision Technology: The Gold Standard for Financial Planning, Analytics and Performance

Rising costs in healthcare is one of the biggest challenges faced by our world today. To solve this grave problem, there needs to be a lot of innovation at scale. Chicago-based Strata Decision Technology is making a difference by creating a definitive market in healthcare for financial analytics, planning, and performance solutions. Healthcare needs to heal, and Starta is here to help.

Founded over two decades ago, Strata Decision Technology is a cloud-based financial analytics and performance platform that is used by healthcare providers for financial planning, decision support, and continuous improvement. The Chicago, Illinois-headquartered company’s customer base includes 2,000 hospitals in its network and many of the largest and most influential healthcare delivery systems in the U.S.

StrataJazz® to the Rescue

The budgeting process in hospitals all over the world needs a major revamp as they are broken and archaic. Organizations today spend three to six months and 100,000+ hours producing a budget that is usually tens of millions of dollars off the mark and out-of-date the moment it is finalized. The solution – StrataJazz®.

StrataJazz® is a single integrated software-as-a-service platform that includes modules for capital planning, continuous improvement, contract modeling, cost accounting, cost management, decision support, financial forecasting, management reporting, operational budgeting and performance improvement, and strategic planning. It is probably the best Advanced Planning tool available in the market today. It simplifies and streamlines how healthcare providers plan, budget, forecast, and manage their operating and capital expenses. The end result is a planning process that is more efficient, accurate, and agile.

The StrataJazz® application earned top honors as the KLAS Category Leader for Business Decision Support in the 2021 Best in KLAS: Software and Services report. It had a score of 90.1 out of 100, which made it one of the highest-rated analytics solutions in all of healthcare information technology. This was the fifteenth consecutive year that Strata Decision Support solutions earned the top spot in KLAS’s end-of-year ranking of healthcare IT software and services vendors.

But a company and its products are only as good as the company’s talented workforce and the workplace culture. Starta’s work is helping make healthcare more affordable and behind this work is a stellar team that believes that they are working on one of the biggest socio-economic problems and opportunities of our time. Whether it be developing products, developing relationships, or developing themselves, growth is always on top of their mind. The company really believes that elevating the team will elevate Strata. This kind of work culture has brought many honors to the company, including Modern Healthcare Best Places to Work 2020, Chicago Tribune Top Place to Work 2019-2020, and many more.

The Leader

Dan Michelson, CEO

He has almost three decades worth of experience in healthcare. He has been one of the industry’s key thought leaders in developing the Decision Support, Financial Planning, Electronic Prescribing and Electronic Health Record markets, including serving on the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology and co-authoring the books Margin + Mission: A Prescription for Curing Healthcare’s Cost Crisis and The Electronic Physician. He is a two-time finalist for Illinois Technology CEO of the Year.

Before joining Strata, he was part of the leadership at a software company. He spent 12 years at this company, helping it grow from a company that had 100 employees initially to one that had over 6,000. He has provided strategy and process redesign consulting for many of the leading hospitals and health systems in the U.S. and served in leadership roles for Baxter Healthcare and AstraZeneca.

He is the co-founder of projectMUSIC™, a benefit concert that sends underprivileged children to overnight camp and of HackHunger™, a collaborative of tech companies working to crack the code on hunger. 

He earned his BS in Finance from Indiana University and his MBA from DePaul University. He is an avid runner, having completed 17 marathons.

Testimonials

“This tool has brought together several departments and processes that we were kind of desperate in before and now we have really come up with a workflow, how we are going to engage other teams and work together to better deliver products to our customers and make better decisions.” – The Wexner Medical Center, The Ohio State University 

“The collaborative nature of the relationship is what separates Strata from other vendors. We feel that they are deeply invested in us because they react quickly, ask us for feedback about areas where they can improve and deliver beyond what they say they will deliver.” – OSF Healthcare

“Some of the advancements we had moving into Strata was in the costing process and we actually had a 96% reduction in time spent costing.” – CHRISTUS Health